When I wrote the reason isn't super clear, I understood that as developers, you're just the sausage makers so to speak. (but let's not think of this in a bad way! Sausages are tasty and a stable of many cuisines!) The loss of agency (or lack of it from the beginning) for developers is not unknown and it's a point I'm extremely sympathetic to. Where I say it's unclear is that:

- Developers don't like bugs

- Users don't like bugs

- When it loses them money, businesses don't like bugs

Every participant in the software chain basically doesn't like bugs and wants to make it better. A bug that does a particularly bad thing at a bad time can be fatal to any business; cosmetic bugs that require constant workarounds can be costly to the users and businesses using the software, and those issues that "only take a second to workaround" add up.

Basically, as I see it all bugs are costing us a ton and chipping away at our time and expenses, but universally we still seem to be pretty okay with even fairly large blocking bugs sitting in production systems for months or longer.

That is the part that is unclear for me; it's well documented how impactful the bugs are, we can measure the costs for everyone involved, lost renewals or contracts because bugs couldn't be fixed fast enough or were deprioritized for something else; but we're still pretty okay with having these sit around.

The only simple answer I can really come up with is that the market is okay with it only because short term profit can still be derived or there is capture, or both and possibly more.

It's just a really bad situation for everyone except a select few who still profit despite everyone hating the situation.

Although when it comes to software that market is quite heavily skewed by the VC funding effect. If "the market" is getting something free or cheap as a loss leader because it's really the VC money that is paying the bills for a few years then end users are going to be much more tolerant of junk for a while.

In the VC model it's boom or bust so quality and coding for the long term might not be business priorities. In the short term unless you're so bad that it's outweighing the sales and marketing push to drive that rapid growth you can get away with a lot. In the long term you don't care so much about maintaining the early code because by the time a big exit is a realistic outcome you have the resources to throw things out and rebuild from the ground up if you need to.

Of course none of that means you're actually providing a good experience to your users during those early years or that they'd be willing to pay enough for what you're offering or stay with you for long enough to sustain and grow your business independently. You're still shipping junk and your users still don't like it. You just don't care because your bills are really being paid by someone whose interests barely align with your users in those early years and the bill payer also doesn't care because they're only interested in the big exits and expecting to write off all their other investments anyway.

If you're a software developer who does want to build good products and have happy users benefitting from them then this kind of market is toxic. If you're a user who just wants good software to do its job so you can get on with yours then this kind of market is toxic. Eventually maybe the potentially paying customers will get wise to the startup game and start avoiding it in favour of alternatives made by smaller companies that bootstrap and aim to build steady and sustainable products and businesses. But there's been so much money splashing around in VC world for so long now that a lot of people just can't think outside the box.