I’ve found giant messes of human suffering even where the tooling chosen was relatively excellent for the problem at hand. The part not being considered is that some problems are hard to solve and developers will make a mess even with the right tools. Programming isn’t easy, but especially in uncharted territory. I think that’s why choosing tools you at least know has merits.

I spent a lot of my career consulting as a mess cleaner, more or less, and even very smart people end up making a mess sometimes. Time constraints, shifting goal posts, all of it.

I’d say the worst thing I ever see, regardless of tools, is premature optimization getting in the way of everything else.