The famous article "The rise of 'Worse is Better'" describes the victory of Unix/C over the "right thing" style of design : https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

Edit: I've changed the link. Thanks for letting me know about the bad redirect, golergka. The jwz link looked fine to me; it's pretty obnoxious if the site does a NSFW redirect.