Of course, but i cant imagine any non trivial project not to be complex.

A lot stuff is built without knowing what will come after, so often you will have layers upon layers that need to get dug through. Thats just how software will always be…

I took weeks or even months to understand how the Magento 2 (a php ecommerce framework) codebase works, probably one of the most complex codebases ive seen personally to date.

I wonder if its possible to avoid code that is meant to represent real-world business logic from being too complex. In most situations, the requirements of a business are constantly changing and writing code that can express that logic without blowing up in complexity is a really difficult problem.