That's not what he said, sounds more like anybody (reasonable) could have handled it alone, or for redundancy in a small team. Boring standardized battletested tech is the opposite of creating a walled garden, and he states (understandably) that this was the problem, for him and the product itself. Very sad story, but seeing what lasagnacode over-and-underengineered-madnesses-at-the-same-timr are put up today, more than completely believable..

Nowhere in the grandparent's post says that it was a "walled garden", or even that it was closed source. The fact that only one person was needed doesn't mean there's only one person available. OP even said he worked for a company in a reply. The rationalisation automatically assumes that the grandparent is either incompetent or lying by omission, which is very uncharitable.

Even if all those problems were true, if it was really analysed as risky, the proper thing to do is to bring in one or two more engineers, perform audits, ask for the full source if it's not available. Ask for documentation. Heck, OP said it's not minified: try to reverse engineer it, if need be. Perhaps it's not even necessary!

There's absolutely no need to bring a 9-digit-sum team to replace a working system made by one person, even if this is common practice in our industry. Not before all other rational avenues are pursued if there are problems.

What also pisses me off is that what happened on the other side might have been caused by companies like the ones I worked for. For a long time I worked for consultancies, and it was routine for sales to "translate" our feature lists into procurement rules (sorry don't know the term in english) and give that to companies and government so we would be the only ones able to answer.

And the worst part is that software engineers go on with this tune because they enjoy so much overengineering everything from scratch.

Didn't say it was a walled garden. But management has its own ways and quirks I said it was possible that the situation was seen by mgmt as a walled garden.

Seen as.

And I answered to that already on my second paragraph.

Taking the nuclear option after merely "seeing [something] as" risky without exhausting the much-cheaper remaining options is not "somewhat understandable, if not plain reasonable". And it's not "ways and quirks": it's incompetence at best or corruption at worst.

This kind of situation might be common, but it is not understandable nor reasonable.

Seems like you are the one being uncharitable.

For better or worse there are tons of both reasonable and unreasonable factors as to why a large company would replace a part time developer's side project with something that costs 9 figures.

You don't know those reasons, the person you replied to doesn't know those reasons, and in fact the OP probably doesn't even know those reasons (they "used to turn up to that customer annually for maintenance").

>"Seen as"

Without understanding that it can be simply and cheaply fixed by training second person is gross incompetence. Those single cell morons should've been fired instead.

What details must be missinh for 100 lines of js and a sql backend with or without orm to be a walled garden?

>"It is also possible that this project and you being the only one handling it were analyzed as a risk"

If that was indeed the case then hire a "backup" person. Way cheaper.

Absolutely.

But would you be surprised of such a decision?

Heres a proposal: As organizations grow, the size of a solution becomes imcreasingly proportional to the size of the organization rather than to the size of the problem.