> My experience as a consultant to business is that they only ever bring in consultants when they need a fix and are in a hurry.

No, that's fair, and I think you're right about that. But refactoring 300,000 lines 'real quick' isn't going to happen, regardless of that. :)

> They want a deep specialist in K8? Sure, they'll hire a consultant. Someone very specialist in React? They'll hire a consultant. C++ experts? Consultants again.

I implicitly had narrow technical specialisations in mind, albeit including ones that intersect with things like "insurance industry workflows".