The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.

There is some brotherhood of coders who will not acknowledge programmers are anything less than perfect. All bugs and errors are the fault of project managers.

If an engineer executes on bad intent and design goals and builds a bad bridge, that's also a bad engineer.

Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.

Is it 2019 again?

Can you explain this to me? I think it's far more 2000s, when we were having debates about whether software engineers were actually engineers, with professional responsibility, or not.

I don't think they're talking about the debate itself, but maybe about the software job market of the 2010s. Back then, software engineers were more scarce and valuable than today, hypothetically giving them much more leverage to say 'no' to bad orders. Nowadays, many people are just trying to stay under the radar and remain employed.

WinUI 3 was upgraded to stable/release when it had literally thousands of outstanding issues, including stuff like [fully replicable] 'using drag and drop causes the program to crash.' That was about the time I started opting out of the entire MS ecosystem after investing decades in it.

I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.

There's a reason why people either stick to Win32 or go with something like Electron when it comes to making Windows apps.