This is well stated wisdom.

It also applied/showed half a century ago. Software is very developer dependent.

What that reveals isn't encouraging.

I think it is fair to say, the big order bits of software design quality - in general - have moved very little. Certainly less and less over the decades.

I do believe that where quality is very highly valued, there has been slow but valuable progress.

But everywhere else you look, software systems pervasively demonstrate obviously poor design.

That this may involve the unavoidable problems dealing with complex underlying systems, as much as it represents the application developer's lack of taste, isn't an excuse. It just demonstrates that poor design permeates the stack.

This is not an argument for perfection, but an observation that even slow mostly-monotonic progress has proven to be out of reach. So far.

There is a fundamental problem being unrecognized and unsolved.