There's a moment in every institution's history where the energy required to maintain it exceeds the value it provides. The people inside can't usually see it. They're busy with the maintenance. Some people from the outside see it immediately.

We're at that moment with a lot of systems simultaneously. Normally these transitions happen one at a time. Now they're overlapping, and the spillover isn't manageable.

The parallel path is now the less risky path. Building something new is safer than reforming something old that's actively failing. This sounds counterintuitive, but when the default trajectory is toward collapse, the calculus changes.