Of course! If the codebase gets non-performant or hard to maintain, all you have to do is rewrite it to be not-that.

Typically makes sense to fire anyone who wrote the broken version too, just to get a fresh set of eyes on it.

Not sure why there’s any non-performant or unmaintainable code in light of this fact.

I appreciate the irony, but it doesn't have to be that drastic. In Australia we have the Law Reform Commission, which looks to gradually make laws better. Is the legal system perfect? Far from it. Does it get political? All the time. Is it getting better? I would argue yes, slowly.

To your analogy, it's possible to incrementally improve a code base. It's also possible to stop it getting worse.

Right, which no one (to my knowledge) is opposed to.

Prosecutors have political lobbies.

So too do prison guards and their unions.

You would be hard pressed to find a union that represents prison guards which has supported ANY kind of political reform to laws. Legalization, even changes to traffic laws, prison guard unions and their members almost exclusively vote against.

Just for two examples.

No no, the claim was that there are people who are trying to "make laws better."

No one disagrees with doing that. They might disagree on what "better" means, and in particular better for whom. But 95%+ of the disagreement on these is not because one side is evil and the other is not.

Irony noted, but I think it's rare for the horrors of a codebase to be deliberately inflicted for self-enrichment or cruelty.

Isn't that the whole point behind A/B testing? Find the accidental dark patterns that will maximize extraction?

Ah, I see. I was thinking in terms of spaghetti hell.

I wrote a big chunk before I recalled that this is just an analogy. We're wandering off topic.