Yep. IMO the largest part of the complexity today is caused by the things you mention in your post: trend-chasing among engineers, especially inexperienced ones, and non-engineers constantly bending the process, trying to make themselves useful and pushing too hard for useless micro-features and nice-to-haves, to the point the architecture of applications is compromised.

In the case of the airplane, it’s essential.

We're not building airplanes though. We're building line-of-business apps -- it's like 80% CRUD