[profmonocle]

It's not just WordPress. A company I used to work for has tens of thousands of lines of jQuery code powering their enterprise SAAS product.

A rewrite in a modern JS framework is just not going to happen unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Much of this code is extremely client-specific stuff written over a decade ago. The argument that using a modern framework helps recruiting doesn't work - the company only pays $75-90k for frontend engineers and has very low turnover, most current engineers have been there 5+ years. And most importantly, their current stack works just fine; they have a bunch of long-time clients who are happy.

A good chunk of software engineering happens in "boring" businesses like this in cities with a much lower cost-of-living than the big tech industry hubs like the Bay Area / Seattle / etc.

[sanitycheck]

The other problem with a "rewrite in a modern JS framework" is that when it's finally done it'll only be a few more years until it needs another "rewrite in a modern JS framework". And that's worse, because at least with JQuery it just stays the same whereas with anything in the NPM ecosystem using anything older than, say, 6 months is kind of a nightmare in terms of dependencies and tooling.

Not broke? Don't fix!