The CTO is a developer, with ~ 17 years of experience, I believe. Although I don't think he wrote any substantial amount of code at all in our product (from the start).

We're an end-user consumer site, and the rate has been stable in term of absolute number (so decreasing in %).

I called the process waterfall because it's a strict requirement - implementation - QA. I'm not particularly concerned with the tech stack, that was just a personal gripe rather than anything.