&gt;<i>cabin for a weekend, and rewrote the whole frontend.</i><p>The problems with big bang rewrites don&#x27;t manifest in rewrites that take 2-3 days. Even if your rewrite burns a full week, if it fails you&#x27;ve only lost a week.  Rewrites are problematic when they are expected to take months or longer. That&#x27;s when the amount of code is high, the complexity is high, and the estimates tend to be bad. Losing many months of forward progress to chase a rewrite can kill a company. If a single lost week can kill your company, you&#x27;re probably doomed anyway.<p>I&#x27;ve successfully done the &quot;big bang&quot; rewrite myself for things that needed a week or so of rewriting. I don&#x27;t believe for a moment that this experience is relevant for large scale rewrites. I&#x27;ve only ever seen those fail spectacularly.<p>Anyone who tells you that a 1-week rewrite is never appropriate is just cargo culting and probably not worth listening to in general. A one week rewrite to avoid weeks of refactoring can be a very good tradeoff. A one year rewrite on the other hand is likely to end in disaster, not least because it guarantees a year of lost forward progress.