To me it rings true. 1x is how much the company could get away with paying, so they did, because companies are reluctant to part with money. 19x is closer to h

To me it rings true. 1x is how much the company could get away with paying, so they did, because companies are reluctant to part with money. 19x is closer to how much value the system was providing, and thus how much resources were allocated to replacing it when that suddenly seemed necessary. If the company had a more long term mindset, they would have been allocating something like 3x devs continuously the whole time, so that when the original dev quit, there was no crisis. But… they didn’t. I’ve seen this kind of short term thinking up close plenty of times. Nothing to do with documentation quality.