[Sammi]

> I started by refactoring into web components, because I had to do it piecemeal.

Yes. The key to making an old and arcane code base understandable to yourself, is to refactor one small part of it at a time. That you're redoing with web components is just one way that would achieve this. I applaud you for not just throwing everything it away and starting anew.

On risk of this approach is that you get some way though and then move on to some other project, and someone else comes along and inherits the old project and starts refactoring in their own style, and so now you have an old arcane code base in three different styles... it still beats a rewrite of a 250.000 line code base in one go.