That level of bureaucracy I’d pretty rough. I’ve seen it a lot in banking, aerospace and govt work in particular. Part of why I’m as finicky as I am about designing away from complexity in new projects. I about complexity. There are times I’d rather have two or more services that are nearly copy paste, vs a shared abstraction and branch statements. As they can grow organically and independent and easier to maintain over time.

Keeping separate concerns behind micro services and their own data can help as well. But then you’re likely to need the overhead of a graphql service in front of them to coordinate and as security constraints.

I’m about 25 years I’m now and love the work. Came in without college, doing design work and here into development. I don’t like the term engineer for software as in practice, it’s more of a craft than engineering discipline.