I think everyone is right on this question :) I have certainly worked in places where there were enormous code bases written in dead languages going back to the 1970s and I was part of the collective belief that nothing could be done about it and our job in the 2000s was to put lipstick on the pig by burying it behind a web portal, if you remember that short-lived fad. In that kind of environment I would have _loved_ an exact port to a modern tech stack from which we could begin the very slow and careful evolution. Speaking to people who work there, AI has indeed changed at least their perception of what is possible and they have traction on porting it that was considered impossible for decades. Whether it works for some definition of “works” remains to be seen, but it might be self-fulfilling because the belief that it can be done will mean it is tried more often and some of those tries will probably succeed.

With that said, I’ve also recently done a rewrite in a completely different sense, taking what used to be a web app and rebuilding from the ground up as a desktop app instead. Having the original code base for core concept reference, but rethinking the whole UI more than a decade on was IMHO a much better approach in that case.