The company didn't fix it because they were profiting from it, and so I left, which cost the company >10x those profits. Either they didn't care, weren't aware of the tradeoff, or simply didn't want a lowly engineer tell them anything about ethics.
A great developer can fix the codebase with a single line of code. A mediocre developer adds hundreds of lines of code to achieve the same thing.
It's definitely hard to measure, and requires some level of understanding before it's even possible to properly valuate.
If that were the case, the companies that did not treat every individual engineer as a special and unique snowflake would have been doing badly. They do not. Hence, it can be derived that while the engineers believe that they are unique super special snowflakes, in reality they are more like electricians - totally interchangeable at a given level of skill.
A closer analogy would be something like.. these companies are employed to unload cargo on ships from the dock. Some engineers can unload ships very quickly, and some propose using shipping containers and cranes. These are much more efficient. But the unloader companies don’t care, because they know they have the contracts locked up anyway. They are not especially intelligent or ambitious other than in the sense that they have some cleverness in the sneaky sense. The company continues to make money, the managers get their bonuses, and there’s still billions in economic waste happening but nobody with the ability to change it cares.