I've seen incremental changes really well. But in those cases there were some important forces at play. Firstly, there was always at least one person advocating

I've seen incremental changes really well. But in those cases there were some important forces at play. Firstly, there was always at least one person advocating for the change. They could make improvements over time, educate other engineers, and react to feedback. Secondly, changes won out on merit. Engineers used new abstractions because they were better, not because they were new. Sometimes abstractions didn't work. And were expunged from the codebase.