Yeah. The hand-wavey reference to advances in parallelisation and cloud runner infrastructure doesn't adequately address the drawbacks of this "post-TDD" approach.
I think that is part of it. When I tried to TDD existing PHP code, it was pretty awful and I hated testing.
At the same time, I think when you design away as much complexity as possible at the product requirements level, as 37Signals proudly does with their products, it is hard to appreciate the complexity inherent to the requirements in other codebases.
I've seen this with other developers coming into large codebases with lots of complexity and scale requirements wanting to use a simple/naive ORM solution with no caching or worry about query speed/quantity. That solution falls over and they quickly learn that the requirements are more complex than a simple app with a few dozen users.
Basecamp is obviously at a high level of traffic and scaling complexity, but they still work to reduce requirement complexity which isn't always an option if you aren't the product owner.
