> actually keeping something alive (let alone building new features or making those features work) takes more and more man hours.

And the people who made the brittle architectural decisions aren't the ones suffering the fallout increasingly often; with companies shunning internal promotions and substantial raises, more and more developers turn into nomads who switch companies every other year just to keep up with inflation. They rarely if ever get a chance anymore to grow with a single codebase and learn what makes it stable and easy to iterate on long term.