This reads pretty bad, and I believe it was. I worked on (and was at least partly responsible for) systems that do the same thing he described. It took constant force of will, fighting, escalation, etc to hold the line and maintain some basic level of stability and engineering practice.

And I've worked other places that had problems similar to the core problems described, not quite as severe, and not at the same scale, but bad enough to doom them (IMO) to a death loop they won't recover from.