Strangely enough my experiences are mostly from smaller companies that are not public traded in Germany - so very different from a typical US public company, my bosses might had sociopathic traits but I doubt that it's true for all of them - it's more the complete disregard for the product quality and disregard for investing in your employees and the inability to solve more complicated issues that is pervasive through all these gigs. I'm talking about terrible UI and software bugs. Not some small debatable things.

Maybe it's really about wrong incentives and lack of technical excellence.

Government money keeps coming in and making it broken and buggy actually assures ongoing contracts. Investment in skilled workers or solving technical issues is not paid for and everyone - company and customer are completely disconnected from the end user and feedback mechanisms are broken or manipulated.

It's maybe a mix of all the different answers my post got.