One thing I would say about the whole "good enough is good enough" mentality is that if everyone has that mentality in a company, your code quality will decline so far that it will be impossible to get anything done in the future. This has happened to my company because ten years ago people had this mentality and it did work for them, getting us a lot of market share and short term success due to high profit margin. However, today we are suffering immensely due to those decisions, losing customers and new hires because no one can get anything done except put out fires due to critical customer issues.
I think a healthy mix of idealists and realists is necessary.. With senior developers representing a good majority of the former.
I think she covered that by mentioning that architecture is more important as a senior developer. My understanding as a senior developer by what she means is not to focus on optimizing the hell out of code. Too often, people would demand others use the most optimize piece of code, but if the code is only going to be called once or twice, you should focus your time on other things more important.
I think your company is suffering from bad architecture design more than anything else. It seems like everything is tightly coupled with little room for modifications. This probably means those senior developers weren't really senior to begin with. This tends to happen at startups where business is prioritized and people get hired with inflated titles. I have seen that happen in a lot of startups.
What happened here was different. This is a top 25 Silicon Valley company, thousands of employees.. But with poor software habits. The people who designed the architecture were always under tight time constraints from upper management, so they always accepted the good enough approach.
But you are right! The company is suffering from horrible architecture.. And any attempts to change it are near impossible because of the sheer amount of code and processes that we have. It seems like a never ending battle
I think a healthy mix of idealists and realists is necessary.. With senior developers representing a good majority of the former.