Computer scientist here. I love Donald Knuth, but he never maintained production systems :)

I’m being a bit provocative here, just to make two points:

a) Software development back in the day, especially when it comes to service, reach, security, etc., was completely different from today. Black Friday, millions of users, SLAs, 24-hour service... these didn’t exist back then.

b) Because of so many conditions — some mentioned in point (a) - prematurity ends when the code is live in production. End.