[michaelt]

Sounds to me like someone looked at the production failures and declared "These failures are due to technical debt and poor code quality. What can we do to fix that?"

And "we have dependencies that have been EOLed and need to be upgraded" is easy to quantify and fix - whereas "The codebase is too large, complex and unfamiliar for us to recognise bugs in one another's contributions" is difficult to quantify and fix.