Yeah nah. We don’t describe code as “awful” because we truly want to rewrite from scratch. Code can be quite awful simply because a company has a high developer turnover due to hiring practices (you can code? Good, write our payroll system) and management (the bearings will continue until morale improves).

As a result you end up with every function using different nomenclature, different approaches to encapsulation, differing levels of compliance to Demeter, bizarre side effects because they made sense in the one day that developer was allowed for that feature, and so on.

So “less than ideal patterns and practices” does indeed count as “awful” code where the maintainer has to learn a new coding style for every file in the codebase.