Your wild guess is flat out wrong. When the previous tech lead came in the entire thing was spaghetti. His strategy was to slowly start bringing in some order

Your wild guess is flat out wrong. When the previous tech lead came in the entire thing was spaghetti. His strategy was to slowly start bringing in some order to the chaos which we did, diligently, over two years making tons of progress. It was a homebrewed framework but it was really nice (he'd had years of experience contributing to Drupal). All the business critical functionality had been converted to this. The spaghetti parts were features that were essentially "complete". Since they never needed updating, they worked fine as they were.