Nobody wakes up one day to find their Salesforce Org has collapsed. There's no single Flow that brings the whole thing down, no one Apex class that finally tips it over. What actually happens is slower and much harder to notice from the inside: every Profile, every Permission Set, every Record Type that gets added without the old one being removed makes the next change a little more expensive. For a long time the Org keeps working. It just gets slower to touch.
Complexity doesn't announce itself as a problem, because nothing is technically broken. Deployments still succeed. Reports still run. But every change now requires more testing, more tribal knowledge, more of the one person who still remembers why that strange Pick list Value exists. The cost of touching anything keeps climbing until, at some point, it becomes cheaper to route around a broken process than to fix it. That's the collapse. Not a crash, a quiet abandonment of the system by the people who are supposed to be improving it.
I've seen a five year Salesforce Industry Cloud implementation get fully decommissioned for exactly this reason. Not because the platform failed, but because the accumulated complexity made forward motion impossible. Nobody planned for that outcome. It happened one unremoved Permission Set, one duplicate Record Type, one "we'll clean it up later" at a time.
The fix isn't a heroic rebuild. It's treating cleanup as a permanent line item, not a project that starts once things are already unbearable.
Book a free 60-minute Salesforce Technical Debt Audit: a score for Usability and Build Quality, and your top cleanup priorities.