I started a project with “I’ll just build a simple entity component system”
I quickly abandoned it because that does not work at all if you have not planned out all of the features you’ll use.
With all the features modern games have, and their portability across platforms and graphics stacks, yeah it’s damn impressive these things work.
My answer is I got promotions and now I’m not allowed to spend time on making nice code, I just have to get results and I’m closely judged by volume over quality.