It's definitely a daunting task, and I've been in that position once and I think it was a pivotal role in my career. I was hired as the only android engineer o

It's definitely a daunting task, and I've been in that position once and I think it was a pivotal role in my career. I was hired as the only android engineer on a project that had churned 3 devs already, each with their own code style, and they all built layers on top of one another. It's hard to be in the position where a full re-write would be simpler technically, but impossible politically. My strategy was to basically refactor layer by layer, bringing the codebase back to a mostly working state in between modules. Over the course of 6 months I basically re-wrote the whole app and reduced the LOC by 50% while taking our crash rate from ~10 percent to < 1 percent. It was painful, but I'm no longer overwhelmed or overly annoyed by legacy code filled with cruft. It really is possible to chip away at it piece by piece and end up in a great position, and knowing how to pull that off is what separates the good from the great. Theres no perfect codebase, and having the skills to continually refactor and improve while delivering features is key.