I think it is safe to say we have improved as a company between when the code was started and the rewrite. And we have improved a lot since then.
We have also improved a lot as an industry. The rewrite was started in C++98 because C++11 was still a couple years away. Today C++23 has a lot of nice things, but some of the core APIs still are C++98 (though less every year) because that is all we had the ability to use. And of course rust wasn't an option back then, but if we were to start today would get a serious look.
Once we did a major rewrite from Perl/C++/CORBA into Java, during the glory days of Java application servers, three years development that eventually went nowhere, or maybe it did, who knows now.
In hindsight, cleaning up that Perl and C++ code, even where both languages stand today, would have been a much better outcome, than everything else that was produced out of that rewrite.
But hey, we all got to improve our CVs during that rewrite and got assigned better roles at the end, so who cares. /s
We have also improved a lot as an industry. The rewrite was started in C++98 because C++11 was still a couple years away. Today C++23 has a lot of nice things, but some of the core APIs still are C++98 (though less every year) because that is all we had the ability to use. And of course rust wasn't an option back then, but if we were to start today would get a serious look.