I suspect this is not limited to networking stacks.
I see a whole lot of fretting over technical debt here on NH, and the more i see it the more i find myself thinking that said debt do not just happen. There will always be a reason, and it likely it can never be fully avoidable.
As such, whenever i see someone joyfully ripping out old code or rewriting something from scratch, i can't help think that at best it has reset the clock with a few years. We will be right back where we started, and then some, soon enough.
For example, the company I currently work for has 15 years of unaddressed technical debt, and it has enormous impact on everything we're doing today. Fixing it is absolutely necessary, and where it's been possible to do so it's already made a significant impact.
However, in a few years things will likely still be awful and even the shiny new improvements will have been dirtied up, because the cultural and managerial decisions that led to the current state are still in full effect. You're correct in that technical debt is ironically usually as much a people problem as a technical one and solely-technical solutions are usually inadequate.
That doesn't mean that I'm going to stop fixing things where I can and pushing for change though, because at the very least it means my life there will be a little saner (until I finally burn out on fighting the tide and find somewhere different to go).
I see a whole lot of fretting over technical debt here on NH, and the more i see it the more i find myself thinking that said debt do not just happen. There will always be a reason, and it likely it can never be fully avoidable.
As such, whenever i see someone joyfully ripping out old code or rewriting something from scratch, i can't help think that at best it has reset the clock with a few years. We will be right back where we started, and then some, soon enough.