> There should be some balanced path in the middle somewhere, but I haven’t stumbled across a formal version of it after all these decades.

That's very simple. The balanced path depends directly on how much of the requirements and assumptions are going to change during the life time of the thing you are building.

Engineering is helpful only to the extent you can forsee the future changes. Anything beyond that requires evolution.

You are able to comment on the complexity of that large company only because you are standing in the future into 50 years from when those things started take shape. If you were designing it 50 years back, you would end up with same complexity.

The nature's answer to it is, consolidate and compact. Everything that falls onto earth gets compacted into a solid rock over time, by a huge pressure of weight. All complexity and features are flattened out. Companies undergo similar dynamics driven by pressures over time, not by big-bang engineering design upfront.