Why?...because fucking management is dumb AF....at the end of the day, I need a paycheck.
Management isn't dumb. They have incentives that are different than yours, and they chase their own incentives.
Not evangelizing Ruby,
You should, it's a great language.
It definitely is much more effort and takes more skill and experience to respect KISS than just heap complexity on complexity
It doesn't take more effort (it does take more skill). Some people say it takes more time up front, and that may be true, but it pays off within days if not hours or even minutes (meaning total time required is less).
There are several reasons for this:
1) A major part of KISS is reducing redundancy. You are literally writing fewer lines of code.
2) The benefit of refactoring tends to begin earlier rather than later (ie, move your methods around, rename variables) within the first 500 lines of code.
3) Most of the time of software development is in testing. Well written code requires less testing.
etc
The problem with "management" is that management is dumb and often greedy and cannot do long-term planning.
They can do long term planning, but their incentives are about doing things that improve their own career. (If you want people to change, their incentives need to change).
The entire school of foreign policy from Kissinger - Hillary Clinton as sec-State need to be told to just STFU.
The Ukraine war is one parting present from the old snake Kissinger. If he can't play ball, no one can.
Oh, and just because code is old, debugged and works doesn't make it "legacy"
Having personally looked at the old GNU C code, it did not appear particularly difficult to maintain.
Chemistry professors never die, they just fail to react.