I would distinguish two variants of this. There’s just plain inertia, like if you have a big pile of legacy code that accumulated from a lot of work, then it takes a commensurate amount of work to change it. And then there’s security, like a society needs rules to maintain itself against hostile forces. The former is sort of accidentally surreal, whereas the latter is somewhat intentionally so, in that a tendency to re-adapt would be a vulnerability.
I would distinguish two variants of this. There’s just plain inertia, like if you have a big pile of legacy code that accumulated from a lot of work, then it takes a commensurate amount of work to change it. And then there’s security, like a society needs rules to maintain itself against hostile forces. The former is sort of accidentally surreal, whereas the latter is somewhat intentionally so, in that a tendency to re-adapt would be a vulnerability.