I've seen this situation as well. A mature codebase where many of the original authors are gone, with many new devs still getting up to speed. You run into the

I've seen this situation as well. A mature codebase where many of the original authors are gone, with many new devs still getting up to speed. You run into the problem where these todos never get touched because you don't know which are the loadbearing hacks, and tumbling down the rabbit holes won't help you get up to speed. The only real way to combat this is to dedicate a small team to just start ripping things out/upgrading things/etc. The only way to clear a minefield is to blow up all the mines....