This sort of code will not provoke those sentiments. But it has provoked those sentiments in nearly everyone who's commented. Including the very comment you're

This sort of code will not provoke those sentiments. But it has provoked those sentiments in nearly everyone who's commented. Including the very comment you're replying to! I don't see anything about the original example that makes it less prone to being rewritten. Nothing's going to stop a programmer who's hell-bent on rewriting something. And "modification" and "replacement" are not that different anyway, especially when the scale is small.