there's almost no cost to frequent updates and modifications.
That's absolutely not true at all for the vast majority of domains. For example there's a reason a lot of financial computer infrastructure still runs shitty old COBOL code and it's not just laziness and lethargy, there is real cost to rewriting it and then extensively testing the rewrite.
Sure maybe you're right, maybe the risks and upfront work would pay out in the future but it's not like being conservative with these things is highly unreasonable and just a result of laziness.