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You're totally right: balance is the key. At least where you work there's a deployed product in production, though it is difficult and unwieldy. When you go the architecture astronaught direction, it's very easy to never make it into production at all!

Sounds like they only focused on short-term business needs.

Maintainability and security are definitely business needs, but they're long-term instead of short-term, so it's easy for new companies to underinvest in them.

I don't think that feature creep is a characteristic or symptom of a poorly-architected software system. It's just indicative of immature product/business management or conflicts of interest spanning the entire organization.