I don’t think it is so much that they don’t have better things to do as it is that their primary project is blocked by some distant tool not quite doing what they need and unwilling or unable to make it do what they need.
So the engineers roll their own. It works perfectly well for their narrow use case , but is also half-baked for the general case.
Then a year later some distant team sees that you half baked solution would work for them if it were generalized a bit, but you don’t have the time or resources to help this distant team. So yet another half baked solution appears.
So the engineers roll their own. It works perfectly well for their narrow use case , but is also half-baked for the general case.
Then a year later some distant team sees that you half baked solution would work for them if it were generalized a bit, but you don’t have the time or resources to help this distant team. So yet another half baked solution appears.