What tends to happen in reality, after the code gets 7-8 years or more long and it's always been piecemeal and spaghetti code then each change is exponentially

What tends to happen in reality, after the code gets 7-8 years or more long and it's always been piecemeal and spaghetti code then each change is exponentially more difficult to make. There is the story by Robert C Martin about the company that made a really good C debugger back in the day. Then C++ came out and the company promised to make a version for it. Well months came and went and eventually they went out of business. Because the first version of the debugger they wrote was awful code it made changes really hard to mark and so they couldn't adapt to the changing market.