I think it exists on a spectrum, where on one extreme you have enterprise software, designed top-down by stupid managers with everything tacked together, but polished. What I mean is everything is nailed together haphazardly, but they put in so many nails and fine-tune so many adjustments, that it's sturdy anyway. Then they put a facade over it to hide its ugliness. They have analytics, observability (Grafana), monitoring and alerts, etc. But at the end of the day, everything works, and it's taken very seriously if it doesn't.

On the other extreme end you have some crazy evil genius mad scientist guy building strfry on weekends. It's a beautiful fusion of science and art. Do we know how many people use it? No. Do we know what it's doing internally? Not really. Does an alarm go off when it stops working? If anything, having that kind of responsibility would be very off-putting. You can take it or leave it as it is.

I realize I'm just describing open source projects.