It doesn't. Our operating systems force us into this world of hell.
All major systems today are extremely mutable and scope everything globally. Change one knob somewhere, the other half of your system implodes. The vast majority of systems are so bad that you can't even have multiple versions of the same library, so using software A can exclude software B!
And instead of fixing this layer, we have built hacks on top: Containers, VMs, Flatpak (yes, it's a hack on top!), and only partially, NixOS (it fixes packaging, but not the runtime part)
Our systems being the way they are make everything worse. Security, performance, installation size, and so on. You don't realize it as you don't interact with lower parts of the stack, but UNIX and POSIX are truly vile ideas that have made everything worse.
We need something new. With the age of AI, I think it's even mass adoptable (LLMs are pretty good at doing verifiable, tedious but trivial tasks such as packaging software). You can't slop the foundations though, and that is unsolved. I'm trying to fix it, but it is not a one man task at all
can anyone ELI5 why software needs to be "maintained"?
Like why do you need whole teams working on stuff that already works? Hardware doesn't work like this
If it functions, it functions and does not need to be changed unless you're replacing something worn out.