I think this sense of “less is more” roughly means refactoring? I think the reason these go south so often is because we’re likely moving complexity around rather than removing it. Removing a layer from the stack means making a different layer more complex to take over for it.

Generally that seems to be true u less we're talking about removing cruft that wasn't needed.

Yearly front-end rewrites are quite the joke, but they also reveal that the team didn't really get the underlying assumptions correctly.

Or maybe they just really wanted to try Redux/Zustand/Jotai/the cool new router and ended up making a mess that will need cleaning next year.