There’s an old saying about website development. You can do it quickly, cheaply, or properly. Pick only two.

When you said:

Everything is too late, too fast, too underspecced, too rushed, and too cheap.

That’s part of the “credit mentality” in action. People thinking they can pay later for something they can’t afford now. In being in a total rush to the goal they cut off their nose to spite their face. It WILL bite them with technical debt in the long run. It is also a leading contributor to why the big clients I serve oft end up in court for accessibility failings as that aspect of “just use HTML the way it was designed to be used” is one of the many things sacrificed on the altar of “wah wah wah, eye wunts eet nowz!!!”

As a whole our society has come to expect instant gratification from everything. NOBODY seems willing to invest in the future and it is why so many startups fail before they even get started! Once that starting up nest-egg / investment money is gone, you end up — as you put it — running on fumes because the weight of that technical debt is crushing anything resembling profit.

Which results in having nothing left to do what’s really important; like turning visits into conversions. This is even more true when you have artists PRETENDING to be designers, putting stroking their ego with bling-bling fancy graphics instead of putting front and center what really matters: CONTENT!

As a dearly departed friend, business partner, and “apprentice who became the master” used to say:

People don’t visit websites for the fancy graphics you hang around the content, they visit FOR the content!

Good gravy, has it really been nearly 12 years since Dan Schulz passed away?

It’s probably the top two things I see screwing over businesses when it comes to their web presence. Unrealistic time expectations and a focus more on appearance than substance. Third would probably be “constantly chasing the latest hotness”.