What is the relationship between pruning and progress?

You cannot make something better by continuously adding to it. You must prune. You must rebuild. You must create an end for things. The SpaceX Raptor engine is the perfect example. Every version could have been the final one. They already had a valid solution. But they kept going, kept subtracting, and the third version is astronomically more powerful than the first. Companies need refounding events at the department level for the same reasons. Layer-caking on top of something that was built for a different era is how you end up with a product that is fossils all the way down.