great point, the more of these kinds of shortcuts accumulate, the more complicated it becomes to think about related changes in future, making maintenance, training new team members more time consuming and expensive. maybe not quite the same as "technical debt", but some kind of debt.

tangentially, re: organising things to reduce cognitive load, there is an interesting discussion with the authors of the book "team topologies" who characterise the purpose of platform teams as existing to _reduce the cognitive load of stream-aligned teams_ (who have the goal of providing a user-facing service or product, say). https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/software-architecture-team-to...