You can only say such things with hindsight. In the moment, nobody knows what the future will hold. Take the space program in the US for instance. In 1969 we landed a man on the Moon. We'd repeat that several times until 1972. At that point Nixon made a speech which implied various unpleasant things about space's future, but he'd be out of office, disgraced, a couple of years later, so how big a deal could it have been anyhow?

I think almost nobody from that era would have believed you if you told them that more than 50 years later not a single human would have traveled beyond low Earth orbit, and that we'd now be struggling to recreate what we did in 1969. Furthermore a significant chunk of the world doesn't even believe we landed on the Moon anymore, no doubt in part because of this apparent anachronism.

It's not like there was any sort of collective or even singular decision to just let things die out. I mean sure Nixon did his thing intentionally, but even as a President in the golden years of the US, he was still just one man.

Basically everything collapses as far as it is allowed to, and the collapse is slowed only by:

- profit, if a system generates it, people will keep the system running.

- dilligence, usually driven by personal idealism, and unrewarded.

- legal or financial penalties, or insurance costs.

- it has collapsed to a temporarily stable state for now.

For another comment I was looking at the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK around 2017 and the people who lived there had been raising fire risks for years and the landlord (management organization) and the council had been ignoring them, and ignoring the fire department. The companies which replaced the cladding on the tower with flammable cladding were choosing the cheaper flammable option and pointing fingers as well. And during the fire, the fire service had never dealt with such a big fire and didn't have a truck with a long ladder, didn't have extended-breathing gear, had radio problems, water pressure problems from the local water company (who deny that).

This kind of backstory is typical for disasters, and for IT outages - and I've taken to believing that if something "should work" but wasn't tested recently then you should expect that it doesn't work. This is a common saying in backups (you need to test restoring), but it seems to apply everywhere. Backup internet connections that don't have enough bandwidth for the company to keep running. Disaster recovery sites that share resources with the production site. 'Disaster recovery' that recovered into a remote site, but they couldn't do CAD work remotely over their slow connection so it was still disastrous. Multiple power feeds but they were cross-wired so one failing still functionall took down everything.

If knowledge transfer "should be happening" but it's not critical to a job, or it's not profitable, or it's not legally required and audited, then it isn't happening. Subject to the dilligent idealist employee mentioned above who are temporary in the long view. Management's involvement seems not to arrange the larger system to effectively shoulder responsibility, but rather find ways to avoid personal blame while cutting costs beyond the point where everything that needs to happen keeps happening.

It’s the responsibility of the management to make sure the knowledge transferred to new generation.

That's just lazy thinking, and probably a sign you've never been a manager. For all the responsibility to lie with management you'd have to be leading people who enthusiastically do what they're asked to do, raise problems, document things, follow processes, and make sure everything is handed over to the next person when they leave.

That's not how people are. They'll have times when they're unmotivated, underpaid, grumpy, over-worked so they miss things, etc. That's when the organisational tech debt starts piling up, and there's nothing a manager can do to stop it except manage it as best they can even though they're under the same pressure, with the same lack of motivation and crap pay as everyone else.

It's so easy to think you can fix it just by keeping on top of it and micromanaging where it starts to show up. It doesn't work that way.