> Because it protects you from nasty surprises, it slows down the codebase’s progression into a mess, and it allows you to take advantage of future improvements.

The codebase is already a nasty surprise for people coming in from the outside with experience or people that are aware of current best practices or outside cultures, therefore, the codebase is already a mess and you cannot take advantage of future improvements without a big bang since that would be inconsistent.

How to keep your code evolving in time and constantly feeling like it is something you want to maintain and add features to is difficult. But constantly rewriting the world when you discover a newer slight improvement will grind your development to a halt quickly. Never implementing that slight improvement incrementally will also slowly rot your feelings and your desire to maintain the code. Absolute consistency is the opposite of evolution: never allowing experimentation; no failed experiments mean no successes either. Sure, too much experimentation is equally disastrous, but abstinence is the other extreme and is not moderation.