[majormajor]

> I would propose alternative is to fix your monolith first. If the team can't rewrite their ball of mud as a new monolith, then what are the chances of successfully rewriting and changing architecture?

A million times this. If you can't chart the path to fixing what you have, you don't understand the problem space well enough.

The most common reply I've heard to this is "but the old one was in [OLD FRAMEWORK] and we will rewrite in [NEW FRAMEWORK OR LANGUAGE]," blaming the problem not on unclear concepts/hacks or shortcuts taken to patch over fuzzy requirements but on purely "technical" tech debt. But it usually takes wayyyyy longer than they expect to actually finish the rewrite... because of all the surprises from not fully understanding it in the first place.

So even if you want the new language or framework, your roadmap isn't complete until you understand the old one well enough.