What really surprises me is that I got to the end and no one mentioned what seems obvious to me: if they are doing a rewrite (in any language) of a horrible cod

What really surprises me is that I got to the end and no one mentioned what seems obvious to me: if they are doing a rewrite (in any language) of a horrible code base they made, what reason do they have to believe this time will be different? Yes, we can assume some learning, hopefully some improvement, but as the saying goes, you can write FORTRAN in any language. Switching languages won't magically fix things. Training up your dev team and getting them to start refactoring, OTOH, is a much more interesting proposition.