Exactly. I remember being called into consult on an accounting system for microfinance; the target audience was small to medium-sized. The code had an absurd amount of layering; one path I traced copied the data 8 times from fetch to render, each time into a different set of objects that had basically the same fields, but that were conceptually different.

When I asked about this, I was told it was "best practice" and that if they ever needed to scale, there were now many places they could separate things. I pointed out that for the target audience, they probably wouldn't need to scale. But that if they did, it would be because they were doing 7x the work necessary.

The code was certainly "tidy" from the perspective of the guy who got paid a lot of money to produce architecture diagrams. But it was a nightmare from the perspective of an individual programmer trying to add a feature. They would have been way better off without a lot of quasi-religious design theory slowing them down.