I have anecdotal support with a sample size of 1: This happened to me. I genuinely wanted to care, and wanted to improve the situation, but found I was slowing down (1), introducing bugs with every merge (2) and finally I just left (3).
Business began with a certain idea, then over time pivoted into into better and better, mostly related niches for users. What that meant in terms of the code base is we started with one thing then tried to back-port it in several new directions and ended up with a gigantic ball of spaghetti.
Great job, great coworkers, great technical management. Code base just became so rotted and so overextended, it became untenable.
Business began with a certain idea, then over time pivoted into into better and better, mostly related niches for users. What that meant in terms of the code base is we started with one thing then tried to back-port it in several new directions and ended up with a gigantic ball of spaghetti.
Great job, great coworkers, great technical management. Code base just became so rotted and so overextended, it became untenable.