Article note: That "Maybe don't build culture to suck itself into a black hole when it's financially convenient." is an unusual idea is really distressing.
The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy