Yeah. Or you could picture it as a quarter disc going between coordinates (0, 1) and (1, 0) in a cartesian plane. There are tradeoffs, optimizing for distance from the origin, when moving across the boundary, but I'd argue most architectures land somewhere within the interior.

I disagree. There's such a thing as objectively bad architecture. Design improvements require tradeoffs only for software that has been optimized to a local maximum, which is rare (imo).