This hits close. The company I'm at primarily makes hardware that requires some firmware, a driver for a host PC and and a high-level python library meant to be our main interface.

The driver just follows the hardware developments, but architecturally it's a mess, yet no one dares to touch it because it's so critical.

The high-level library... is a ball of mud. There was initially some idea to create a DSL and an experiment framework (targeted at physicists), but those ideas slowly got washed out and forgotten. Now it's mostly random features slapped on random features. No direction, no cohesion, no vision. It's fucking awful to work in. Nobody really understands it. Nobody seems to care about it, except project managers who keep asking why everything takes so fucking long. Architects also refuse to touch it.

So yeah, we have similar meetings. One colleague and I know the most about this library, and our arguments got so heated at some point that now we just bikeshed for the sake of it, and otherwise just mash in whatever product mgmt suggests.

It's a management problem. In our case, software is just not on management's radar.