This is a natural development as the field matures. I've worked in codebases that had roots in the 1980s, and large chunks of code survived virtually unmodified

This is a natural development as the field matures. I've worked in codebases that had roots in the 1980s, and large chunks of code survived virtually unmodified from the 90s. I'm sure some here could tell stories of even older codebases. Living codebases that have such old roots but have seen gradual maintenance and refactoring such that the whole thing didn't degenerate into spaghetti deserve a lot of respect in my opinion.