There is a general belief that legacy systems, stale code, and archaic tooling are sleeping dogs – we avoid them fearing a collapse from interference or deprioritize them for seemingly more important projects. I think this strategy of intentional avoidance and/or deprioritization is perfect for disasters.

The challenge with systems that do not fail is that they have no fixes when they eventually fail. Thus, it is more urgent to fix these systems than is usually accepted.