I think using "never" should be considered an exaggeration or embellishment, or else clearly disclaim that rewriting code given the existing needs of the busine

I think using "never" should be considered an exaggeration or embellishment, or else clearly disclaim that rewriting code given the existing needs of the business (including the existing code base) is different from writing brand-new code "from scratch". Here's why: I saw a comment in some thread about machine learning yesterday that I think is a good analogy in some cases for what you describe. The comment essentially said that a "never re-write" policy leads to "overfitting" the code to the problems of the past and therefore less flexibility in implementing both fixes for issues and new feature development.