Yes, that's a great point. Once we think of a software system as a depreciating asset we start to see a number of factors which are beyond our control. Another example when we're building web apps is that the competitive landscape has changed -
* 15 years ago no one expected their website to work well on a phone, or serve up much in the way of streaming video.
* 10 years ago no one was expecting that a server should respond in under a second, aka Lighthouse's TTFB, and the concept of say a "Largest Contentful Paint" did not exist.
We can go on forever, so what has happened is that all the practices and expectations within the industry have been redefined (occasionally even for good reason!). To stick with the car analogy, you don't expect much in the way of self-driving features from an older car... hell power windows didn't even become ubiquitous until the 1990s.
So maybe we just can't get a great TTFB and LCP out of our old dependency stack which existed before those concepts were really a thing, and there you have an example of why a rebuild will probably continue to be a "when" rather than an "if" for years to come.
Now we can frame the discussion as "let's partner up to ensure we make the best use out of this system and extend its life as much as is reasonable," which doesn't have to be an adversarial discussion.
* 15 years ago no one expected their website to work well on a phone, or serve up much in the way of streaming video.
* 10 years ago no one was expecting that a server should respond in under a second, aka Lighthouse's TTFB, and the concept of say a "Largest Contentful Paint" did not exist.
We can go on forever, so what has happened is that all the practices and expectations within the industry have been redefined (occasionally even for good reason!). To stick with the car analogy, you don't expect much in the way of self-driving features from an older car... hell power windows didn't even become ubiquitous until the 1990s.
So maybe we just can't get a great TTFB and LCP out of our old dependency stack which existed before those concepts were really a thing, and there you have an example of why a rebuild will probably continue to be a "when" rather than an "if" for years to come.
Now we can frame the discussion as "let's partner up to ensure we make the best use out of this system and extend its life as much as is reasonable," which doesn't have to be an adversarial discussion.