Ah man, way too familiar.

My experience with this particular paradigm is that rapid prototypes get built "just to demo" and "test out ideas" except they always end up in production in front of actual users anyway... because... fuck it. Who cares about code quality, architectural forethought, or how rapidly we're piling on technical debt? Just keep ramming that ball of mud written in a mish-mash of node frameworks out the door as fast as we can! BUSY BUSY BUSY!

Board members are happy because their pet projects get delivered in record time, users are sort of happy because they get a variation of a feature they kind of wanted, and the developers who manage to spew out these semi-functional abominations that are just good enough to pass cursory functional testing are lauded as being hyper efficient 10x engineers.

Everything is going great... except... wait? What's that? Production is down 10 times a day? What do you mean we can't extend that feature and add another widget to it? What's up with the amount of churn in our backend dev team? We have an incredible company culture! Why do people keep leaving after six months?! Why is it taking so long to make simple changes? Huh? Why did we just get a $100K AWS bill? Why do we need to spend $30K a month on that MongoDB cluster that is completely maxed out with only 2000 active users? Why are users constantly complaining and trying to cancel their subscriptions?!?