So one of the interesting things that a lot of commenters seem to miss:
Its not the choice of technology, its the deliberate limiting to those choices. The team have said ok, we are choosing these things, and nothing else. This means that yes, some things are harder to do, but it also means that there is less shit to maintain.
If we built bridges like we built tech, we could see the silliness of choosing the components for the developer rather than the product:
the start of the bridge will be made of steel reinforced concrete, the hand rails will be made of carbon fibre, but they are taking too long, so the team switched to wood.
The middle of the bridge will be made from just steel, because one of the developers wanted to learn how to slip weld.
The tail end of the bridge is a suspension bridge, because one other developer decided that they looked cool.
That's not to say that developer efficiency doesn't matter, but efficiency is very different from "that looks cool, lets do it like that" Limiting choice is good, but when you first start, it fees like a straight jacket.
The difference between buildings and software is that generally a building has a defined „done“ state, but a piece of software keeps changing until it has so many scars of unmaintainable mess that it’s cheaper to start a new company than to fix it.
I mean thats the unwritten/implied problem with software project management.
There is no "Done" state, there is no real plan for the future. It is possible to make software sustainable, but for many reasons there's not much incentive to do so.
Partly because its rare that the business understands that product it makes, or if they do understand, leadership get bored and want to try something new.
Your great analogy provoked a thought, and at risk of taking it too seriously:
The bridge you describe sounds like one that was built and would be maintained in a more organic way. If we repaired more, we'd perhaps have more objects built like this. And we'd in turn learn much more about interactions between materials, and have a larger body of knowledge (and maybe folk wisdom) about objects built with such interactions.
But yes, more risk and uncertainty, which is intolerable in the current culture (though I suspect it could become more tolerable if our energy systems and supply chains start to break down, and the current calculus stops making sense)
Its not the choice of technology, its the deliberate limiting to those choices. The team have said ok, we are choosing these things, and nothing else. This means that yes, some things are harder to do, but it also means that there is less shit to maintain.
If we built bridges like we built tech, we could see the silliness of choosing the components for the developer rather than the product:
the start of the bridge will be made of steel reinforced concrete, the hand rails will be made of carbon fibre, but they are taking too long, so the team switched to wood.
The middle of the bridge will be made from just steel, because one of the developers wanted to learn how to slip weld.
The tail end of the bridge is a suspension bridge, because one other developer decided that they looked cool.
That's not to say that developer efficiency doesn't matter, but efficiency is very different from "that looks cool, lets do it like that" Limiting choice is good, but when you first start, it fees like a straight jacket.