I would argue the author is not really saying "old" is "bad", but instead that we have been piling more and more craft onto the old so it has now become a significant engineering exercise to work around the idiosyncrasies of the old system every time you want to do something else.

To use your wheel analogy. It's sort of like starting with the wheel of horse cart and adding bits and pieces to that same wheel to make it somehow work as the landing gear wheel for a jumbo jet. At some point it might be a good idea to simply design a new wheel.