Here is the question I try to ask before I commit to a design: if I'm still on call for this in three years, and I have to explain it to a new hire on their first week, is this still the right choice?
It's a surprisingly strict filter. Clever tricks tend to fail it. The thing that looked elegant on a whiteboard becomes the thing you dread paging through at 2am, and the thing a newcomer can't follow without a ten-minute story about why it's "temporary."
Designs that pass tend to be boring in the best way. Fewer moving parts. Names that say what they mean. Behavior you can predict without reading every line. The kind of system where the explanation to the new hire is short, because there isn't much to explain.
Most architecture debates are really about the next sprint. This question stretches the timeline until the short-term cleverness stops looking clever and the long-term cost becomes obvious.
Would the design you shipped this week survive that conversation?
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