True, that is surprising and makes everything worse. It’s probably controlled by a setting that none of those engineers knows how to change, based on the lack of knowledge described here.

Or write a tool that can do all these steps for you, reliably!

This sounds 100% credible, based on the outcomes we can see

Sounds like classic junior engineer shit. “Let’s do a big rewrite!” Followed by everything going to shit because they don’t how to create good maintainable software architecture and for whatever reason there weren’t enough senior engineers around to show them the way.

Seriously, it doesn’t sound great, but it sounds about what you might expect wiring up a new UI widget in WPF or whatever the latest thing for native Windows is. Sounds like what would happen if you started developing a Windows app using the Microsoft scaffolding and never applied any kind of software architecture beyond that and it just grew and grew into a big ball of mud. Exactly what I would expect given the quality of so many of their frameworks, and I say that as a professional dotnet software engineer.