it's funny to make jokes about unlocking the next level of the tech tree but on reflection, with a modification, it's not a totally terrible way of thinking about things

the modification is after awhile, you lose the technology the *previous* nodes offered. the conditions to support them no longer exist, nobody is trained in them, nobody can do them

so when the conditions to support your current high tech node also fail, you don't get to fall back to earlier technology. you just have nothing at all

generally, the deeper you go in the tech tree the more dependencies there are, and any one of them failing can be crippling. you're becoming more fragile as you advance, not more robust, trading redundancy and independence for efficiency

it's not like things have to happen that way. we could build in contingencies and backups. but we don't