That's how you end up with unmaintainable solutions and code-bases which die under the cost of just trying to keep the system running, and because they lose the ability to evolve.

I guess I should have provided more context. It was in context of talking about a rewrite into another language to make something more maintainable and performant. To explain how hard that was to get right, and that if we messed it up, customers only really care that we messed it up.