You should check out the rather prolific and open development of Star Citizen. They are building in what I would considered a great compromise between feature focus and long term technical investment.

Some context to why they need to have strong systems in place is that they intend to deliver new content continously into the same platform/engine/world over the course of at least a few years.

So their focus is on fast and efficient asset pipelines and the ability to scale, and to that end they have built some very cool technology, but never without a direct purpose that aligns with those goals.

It is a great example of pragmatic development. They didn't do network optimization until they had to, they didn't use microservices until it made sense, and then only where it made sense, they have made some nifty tools but only to solve problems that had actually manifested.

Not without their failures of course, but we get to learn from those even more so.