That’s exactly what happened. I’m sure the vendor code is riddled with spaghetti code, poorly optimized and undocumented. But as long as they deliver, the business doesn’t have to care about it. They can also just say what they want, and it gets done, without any real pushback from developers.

I can’t blame them for doing this tho, I often felt like we spend most of our time discussing implementation, doing code reviews and optimizing code for the sake of optimizing it. Towards the end it was also clear the business just didn't want to deal with our team anymore, they were annoyed we couldn’t just build the feature they wanted.