One "meta" way of looking at things like this is that it represents a part of the technical debt left behind by the industrial revolution. Eventually we have to

One "meta" way of looking at things like this is that it represents a part of the technical debt left behind by the industrial revolution. Eventually we have to go back and fix this stuff, but as with technical debt in most code bases we tend to ignore it. Unfortunately technical debt is subject to compound interest, so the longer we ignore it the more costly it is to eventually deal with.