This is the correct take. Without the staff and institutional knowledge of a 16 year old service, no amount of hand waving will keep the service healthy. It’s a stunning display of what not to do.
Perhaps the Twitter code is convoluted and messy, but really, you think to such a degree that even a small team of highly-motivated, skilled engineers could not figure it out and keep it running?
Any motivated, highly skilled engineers that's worked on long running global software systems will tell you that maintaining systems is hard, and coldbooting a system is even harder.