[rubyist5eva]

Legacy codebases that are “bad” usually have years of built-up domain knowledge and things to handle “gotchas” and corner cases that somebody new may not know about until they’ve spent a significant amount of time with.

I’ve seen it time and time again, with myself, colleagues above and below my grade, and devs I’m mentoring.

Chestertons Fence is a very important concept to have deeply engrained in your mind.