Unfortunately, that's been the reality in most places where I was engaged to maintain a platform. Usually in-experienced developers do this and it just sticks and the list keeps growing and tech debt increasing until the whole thing is no longer maintainable or even operational in some cases.

There's never enough time to prune the software just like there's never enough time to consider the long term consequences of any decision. The incentive system is usually set up where the focus is always on the next quarter and the short term. And the result is exactly what you'd expect it to be.