If not, then what was created with best practices in the first place?

If we can agree that most large, financially successful software projects are of questionable quality, then either

- they used best practices and yet they still suck, OR

- they did not use best practices, but are widely successful anyway.

So no matter how you look at it, software best practices just haven't panned out.

The name “best practices” kind of implies that they actually are practiced somewhere. So it’s different from theoretical abstract ideas “how we should write software”, which maybe nobody follows.