Agreed, it is not at all a new problem. The enterprisey codebases I’ve encountered are ones that have chronically had no clear owner, or constant ownership churn. I have been in that position before, and I also decided to make the code even more bloated for the same reason: I did not and was not going to have the time to learn the system well enough to safely do a better job.

I think where a lot of people run into problems with the KISS principle is they conflate simple and easy. More often than not, simple is hard. Which is maybe a soft reason why agentic coding, which is all about trying to make every task easy, leads so consistently to complexity and bloat.