Ehh, I think this take needs a grain of salt.

There's a few significant facts here:

- They had an existing functional Zig implementation

- They had an existing test suite for the Zip implementation

- They had a separate JavaScript compliance test suite with ~ 1 million tests

- The person overseeing the rewrite was responsible for a huge portion of the existing codebase and was very familiar with the existing architecture and problems

I don't think that middle management at most companies is going to be starting from that same point when it comes to building or updating something. Generally, I don't think there are many projects out there that have such robust existing tests and specifications.

In this case, the engineering behind the tests and specifications need to also be considered part of the process, since without those you wouldn't be able to build a control loop in the same way.

Also I'm pretty sure Walmart directly hires software engineers and doesn't just outsource everything - https://careers.walmart.com/us/en/results?searchQuery=softwa...