The same kind of perverse incentive exists in other forms in other places, like what drives complexity growth in engineering. With people it’s called empire building. With systems I’ve heard it called “resume oriented programming.”
“I built a massively complex system to manage our cloud deployment” looks superficially more impressive than “I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.”
The first person will have more code they can cite and more expertise wrangling more systems. They’ll be able to talk about all the big sexy “hyperscale” stuff they have managed with lots of terabytes and Kubernetes and terraform and helm charts. Most people would probably hire this person.
I’d hire the second person.
It’s basically the midwit meme, which is so popular because it illustrates something real.
There seems to be a core conflict in society between systems as things we build to do things vs systems as ends in themselves. Morons just do things. Geniuses just do things. Midwits get mixed up into the process of doing things and forget the point.