I suspect this is not quite what that sounds like (possibly slightly misunderstood), really about the complexity of the task and the amount of data points, and

I suspect this is not quite what that sounds like (possibly slightly misunderstood), really about the complexity of the task and the amount of data points, and human nature than it is some gross engineering mistake. The engineers brought in are in the position where they are expected to trash the existing teams code. And then in the context of a slow page load, they might look at it and see up to 1000 of something in RPC and tell Musk and it comes out in a slightly mixed up way when he tries to repeat it. The reason the number of calls gets high is (I guess) not from 1000 individual different types of requests, but from pulling many pages or records each of several things. Anyway it is easy to trash other people's code especially if that's what your boss wants you to do to justify bringing you aboard. I have been the victim of it and also on one or two occasions done the same thing myself to some degree. Another aspect is that no engineer really wants to maintain someone else's code if they don't have to. They are going to have their own viewpoint on architecture etc. and coming onboard is a prime opportunity to start a rewrite. So slamming the existing architecture is just an easy way to try to get that authorized. I think it's a bit of an integrity test coming in and talking about someone else's code base. But people are unfortunately creatures of circumstance, and these things can bring out the worst in some as far as fairness goes. But again, even for a fair person it might be easy in that position to scoff at a codebase. Most people are not particularly high integrity though so will happily take a dump when it comes down to it.