Worse is better is just annoying. Better at what? Domino's pizza is better at market share. It's not better at making good pizza. Most people can agree with these two statements. But just saying "Domino's is proof that worse is better" causes unnecessary arguments
The capitalization, brand recognition, and streamlined corporate franchise structure, cooperate to make it easier to launch and run a Domino's franchise, than to start a pizza joint from scratch.
But not that much easier. There is plenty of room to market better pizza for more money.
Computer systems tend to have strong network effects, there's a lot to learn and a skilled developer is, ceteris paribus, more productive than a greenhorn. Most of the value in operating systems and programming languages is in the ecosystem rather than the core.
Worse is better isn't a universal solvent, there are plenty of areas where it isn't applicable. The original essay† is about why C and Unix were eating Lisp's lunch, and is worth reading.
Sure. So to qualify what you are saying: C is better at achieving broad usage. But it is not better than Zig for writing secure software. It is not better than perl for text processing.
