Because businesses, as a rule, value moving fast. Being first to market makes money and generally results in winning.

Oftentimes the circumstances are "we don't know the requirements", not because of shitty management, but because the problem is inherently hard to define.

The business conditions that do heavily penalize bad architectural decisions, like physical structural engineering, can suck to work in compared to SWE.

It takes a decade or more before you're trustworthy enough to architect a building and there's a million layers of approvals. Then it takes years before groundbreaking, and years more as the building increases in size.

Your whole life might be dominated by a single large project like Hudson Yards, which has been floating around as an idea since 1956. The most recent proposal started in 2006, broke ground in 2012, and another 6+ years to finish. Then when companies were about to move their offices there, COVID-19 happened and the leases fell through.

I'd rather the system that gives average SWEs regular opportunities to lead large projects from scratch and make mistakes.

You can’t often demote them because usually the people responsible for bad initial design decisions left the company years ago with a desperate need to go and start a new mess somewhere else.

All systems eventually turn bad. The idea that you can gold plate something so it won't is naive. It isn't about getting it right from the start, its about having the will to change it once your system or uses evolve into something that turns it wrong.

> i think people that were promoted for building systems that turned out bad, should be demoted

Nope, in the same vein of "lording" over others, they become the expert of knowledge of bullshit. The environments that allow such behavior have already engrained reward of such behavior.