I've seen this stated "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."
It takes the engineer to build it so that every part is 1.25X as strong as it will ever need to be, consistently everywhere.
To the idiot, that then looks like it is barely standing, because some parts are 4X weaker than he would have made them, based on bad intutition.
But in some sense, many ancient engineers had to drastically overbuild their bridges and other structures because they didn't have the tools to know what the "barely stands" threshold was, so they had to build for a big margin of error when they lacked the tools of precision.
It is not scalable, but the quality is quite stable across batches
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome#Structure
> The stresses in the dome were found to be substantially reduced by the use of successively less dense aggregate stones, such as small pots or pieces of pumice, in higher layers of the dome. Mark and Hutchison estimated that, if normal weight concrete had been used throughout, the stresses in the arch would have been some 80% greater. Hidden chambers engineered within the rotunda form a sophisticated structural system.[55] This reduced the weight of the roof, as did the oculus eliminating the apex.
That said, I'm guessing the Pantheon is in one piece (unlike the coliseum) because it's been used as a church for the past ~1600 years and presumably (similar to Notre Dame) it gets repair as-needed.
e.g. building a bridge to support a city's normal traffic density, but the city ends up growing, and the way the bridge was designed makes adding reinforcement difficult. Or building a bridge whose materials start to melt at a certain temperature that's above what's expected for the region, but climate change raises the temperature over the threshold, so it needs a completely different material.
Hence the article's point that software companies should invest in formal methods, because while formally proving something is a long process without much reward in the short term, it eliminates an entire class of bugs which, in some long-term projects, makes it worth the effort.
We know that’s true experientially in both CS (YAGNI) and in the physical spaces (eg Wright brothers constantly iterating with cheap prototypes until they figured out something that worked and SpaceX doing similar things with their prototypes). Iteration = learning. In theory formal methods let you iterate at a cheaper phase of the project. In practice, the methods themselves are very difficult to scale to large projects and these days require you to build the project twice - once for the formal language and then hand-translated to a production language.