I agree with you. From experience, this pain is a red herring, it’s symptomatic of a specific kind of change: new features or bug fixes that require tight coupling of previously-authored-as-decoupled things. Clean code, architecture, whatever - it always falls over in the specific transition from decoupled-to-coupled.
Why do programmers hate making those changes? They always require tossing out a lot of existing code. So I guess I could say the antagonist is inertia. Certainly has been my experience interfacing with vendors and BigCo developers. If you have the ability to suppress this feeling, to delete stuff that works but is not correctly coupled to the new problem, you will thrive regardless of the architecture.
Why do programmers hate making those changes? They always require tossing out a lot of existing code. So I guess I could say the antagonist is inertia. Certainly has been my experience interfacing with vendors and BigCo developers. If you have the ability to suppress this feeling, to delete stuff that works but is not correctly coupled to the new problem, you will thrive regardless of the architecture.