Ask HN: What's the most outrageous over-engineering you've seen in the wild?

Probably Google... just look at the new Android V12

Most microservice architecture

All traffic lights but especially the ones set to do rolling green lights. The rolling green lights assume someone’s going the speed limit (which no one does) so it introduces more stop-and-go than if they all switched at the same time! But traffic lights on their own are all optimized for the peak 20 min of traffic instead of the other 24 hours. They really don’t make sense outside of peak.

Compiled dynamic CSS in React. The most outrageous of it all is their reasoning for it: best of both worlds.

My lecturers used to talk about the over engineering of chemical plants in the USSR. It was something to do with the command economy that meant the engineers over engineered the plants

Then there was Chernobyl...