Actually, what you describe is a bigger problem than simply static maintenance. Overwhelmingly what happens is that, that "rewrite some services in go" and run

Actually, what you describe is a bigger problem than simply static maintenance. Overwhelmingly what happens is that, that "rewrite some services in go" and run them on AWS frequently means that the project is never 100% rewritten in go on AWS because some part gets moved to GCE or whatever in a couple years, and then someone else takes over with different priorities, and they never finish your go/aws migration, etc, etc, etc. In 40 years your project is now written in a dozen different scripting languages, running on a Rube Goldberg number of different platforms. I've worked with people migrating off these machines, and yes they are everywhere in any business/goverment older than 20 years. Companies/Government orgs to this day have hpux/solaris/aix/zos/ztpf/nonstop/iseries/vms/NT/etc systems all over their critical infrastructure because those were the great/new technology at some point. For whatever reason, overwhelmingly the rewrites turn out to be much more difficult than originally expected. Particularly as the original platform/software gets older. The people working on the original software stack weren't idiots, nor did they spend their days playing tetris. If that software has a couple man-decades worth of effort put into it, your probably not going to be able to rewrite it in less and maintain its functionality and quality.