I find one exception to what you're saying. If you had a large role in building that legacy code base you are carrying around all the tech debt and repairs in y

I find one exception to what you're saying. If you had a large role in building that legacy code base you are carrying around all the tech debt and repairs in your head. And if you're mindful of that, you can rebuild guided by what you have learned from the ground up and it will work. See John CarMmack's increasingly awesome series of 3D engines he wrote over the years. But that's not how it usually works in the tech industry where you inherit someone else's code who also inherited it from someone else as it was written by somebody they never met. And on that front you are dead-on