[choeger]

The author is absolutely right. And to add one more point: Debugging such a system has become so difficult that many do not even attempt it anymore. I have seen experienced operators treating their stack like voodoo ("I have no idea why it acts up, but restarting this part seems to help sometimes. Oh and I increased memory on that VM, because, why not.").

For any reasonably successful web application there comes the day when a developer has to investigate the cause of a bug who wasn't there when the application was "young and agile". They will scratch their head above old libraries, out-of-fashion frameworks, tools, and languages, and finally, more often than not, argue that the whole system needs to be reimplemented in X.