Another analogy that comes to mind would be 'going to gym'. Short-term, working out is exactly a heat loss (doing hard work with no useful results). But long-term, it makes you healthier and able to do more things.
Back to corporate IT, it's not that hard to stabilize a decent big ol' legacy revenue generating system, while avoiding making changes. But if the company has to compete against smaller and leaner startups, avoiding changes might become a major risk, as the cost of all changes tends to go up.
So, it would be reasonable to keep the system is a constant state of flux, so that it has no choice but to become fitter and learn to change quickly without breaking: stuff like reproducible builds, reproducible deployment, CI/CD don't matter a lot for monthly stable releases, but one would have a hard time doing nightly stable releases without them.
Back to corporate IT, it's not that hard to stabilize a decent big ol' legacy revenue generating system, while avoiding making changes. But if the company has to compete against smaller and leaner startups, avoiding changes might become a major risk, as the cost of all changes tends to go up.
So, it would be reasonable to keep the system is a constant state of flux, so that it has no choice but to become fitter and learn to change quickly without breaking: stuff like reproducible builds, reproducible deployment, CI/CD don't matter a lot for monthly stable releases, but one would have a hard time doing nightly stable releases without them.