That does look like technical bankruptcy, however rewrites of large projects almost always fail (especially without management buy-in and feature-freezes) A st

That does look like technical bankruptcy, however rewrites of large projects almost always fail (especially without management buy-in and feature-freezes) A strategy you can use is to incorporate any refactor into the estimates for a "new feature" development with the idea being that if you have to touch this part of the codebase that it gets refactored. In this case since there's no framework I suggest to have a framework gradually take over the functionality of the monolith and the fact all the routes are in nginx will actually help you here because you can just redirect the route to the new framework when the functionality is refactored and ported into the new framework. Do not refactor the database as interoperability between the legacy project and the new project can fail although migrations should be executed in the new project. What I do suggest is to get development, staging, pre-production and production environments going because you will have to write a lot of pure selenium tests to validate that you didn't break important features and that you did correctly recreate/support the expected functionality. You can run these validation tests against a pre-production environment with a copy of production. This also gives you feedback if your migrations worked. On the team, that's the hard part. If they walk out on you, you will lose all context of how this thing worked. As precaution, get them to record a lot of video walkthroughs of the code as documentation and keep them on maintaining the old project while you educate them on how to work in the new system. The video walkthroughs will be around forever and is a good training base for new senior devs you bring in. Last, make sure you have good analytics (amplitude for example) so you know which features are actually used. Features that nobody uses can just be deleted. Over time, you will have ported all the functionality that mattered to the new project and feature development in the new project will go much faster (balancing out the time lost refactoring). A business making 20 million/year should be able to afford a proper dev-team though, what are they doing with all that money? You should be able to get budget for a team of 5 seniors and leave the juniors on maintenance of the old system.