A common theme among product teams is sacrificing quality in favor of time to market. However, they don’t see it as compromising quality. They often refer to it as “let’s ship the good enough, and we will fix the shortcomings later.” The problem lies in the “later” part. The “later” rarely comes around after you launch the product.
In a competitive market, you build something imperfect and launch it; the rest is patchwork. It never becomes perfect. Your product becomes bloated and rots over time. Then, someone else builds another imperfect thing slightly better or cheaper than your product and will slowly capture your market.
Then you lose. And you start blaming thousands of different things, except the way you developed your product.
However, there are still some high-quality products and services out there, and those usually survive longer. If you look well, you will see many of those. And they are rarely VC-backed products.
I suspect those are usually things that started as hobby/side projects. They are things that someone has been perfecting in their spare time, with no concerns regarding time to market or even making this commercial.
Things will go sideways when you first build the “business” and then start building the product. You start bending to “market” and “customer demands” in mind, pushing in different directions. It is a given that your product will slowly become bloated and rusty. That is, unfortunately, an accepted fact about the product life cycle.