A software engineer was not involved in this if waterfall is painted positively.

I think the last time I heard an engineer unironically advocating for a waterfall IRL was about a decade ago and they were the one of the crab-in-a-bucket, I-refuse-to-learn-anything-new types—with that being the very obvious motivation for their push-back.

You get used to it, I don’t even see the code—I just see: group… pattern… read-ahead…

Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through a couple of hoops for something better, compared to your average Joe who isn’t even aware of the problem