I am doubting that if you walk over the aisle to the engineers in the other team, and state an obscure legacy issue to him/her. That person would, with decent chance, say something like "how could it be?" "was the original engineer dumb/imcompetent"? "was the original team got reorged"? etc....

Not saying the tech journalist is better in any sense. But let's be honest, there is no reason they should be doing better...