I am not saying to fire everyone. I am just saying that someone needs to be responsible. If you keep the same people in power they will repeat the same mistake. You need to keep domain knowledge but clueless management is just a burden.

That's utopian. The reason cautionary rules like those in TFA exist is because "just undo/revoke all the bad shit that led to your current situation", while certainly appealing in concept, is often impossible in practice. Instead, litmus tests like these, which can be practiced at the dev team level, prove useful. Who knows, if enough dev teams at a company arrive at the same conclusions using reasoning like this, perhaps they really can put enough pressure on management to induce firings of prominent debt-incurring people. Even (and more likely) if not, that understanding at the engineering level will help mitigate future damage/mistakes.

New people will repeat most of original people mistakes too - many bad designs look good before you tried them.

But also, wtf is it with people that the first instinct in any kind of situation is to fire everyone.

I think it's the phrase used by someone else in the comment chain: "clueless management".

You can have the best developers and architects in the world, but clueless management will sabotage anything they do, whereas good management can accomplish plenty with teams that aren't the best possible.