I'm exaggerating the horribleness of the codebase for effect. Lots of it is in good shape, and we've been working on incremental rewrites to fix up the worst legacy spots. There are certainly bad bits, but they're also working bad bits, whose badness largely comes from being hard to bend to new use-cases.

However! I see a lot of developers who would have a hard time fixing a bug / making a small change in an area which has a lot of legacy cruft present without going and rewriting the whole thing. Now, they are right that rewriting it is probably the best course of action from a codebase-health viewpoint... but it's not necessarily the actual best use of their time. If code is working then it's not an urgent priority that it get rewritten.

To be slightly trite, "perfect is the enemy of good."

That's why we'd like to get developers who are okay with the idea of working on a codebase that contains legacy code. And that's why I'm a little bit over the top about it.