Hold up... "lazy engineers" are the problem here? What about a society that insists on shoving the work product of unfunded, volunteer engineers into critical infrastructure because they don't want to pay what it costs to do things the right way? Imagine building a nuclear power plant with an army of volunteer nuclear engineers.

It cannot be the case that software engineers are labelled lazy for not building the at-scale solution to start with, but at the same time everyone wants to use their work, and there are next to no resources for said engineer to actually build the at scale solution.

> the path of least resistance for themselves.

Yeah because they're investing their own personal time and money, so of course they're going to take the path that is of least resistance for them. If society feels that's "unethical", maybe pony up the cash because you all still want to rely on their work product they are giving out for free.