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> But long before the rewrite project achieve feature parity with the original, it is already marred by the same issues that motivated the rewrite.

I think there are definitely counter-examples. Can you imagine using an OS in 2020 based on incremental improvements in Mac OS System 9, or Windows ME. Or browsing using a browser based on incremental improvements in Netscape 4.7?

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These are hypotheticals, but isn't the Blink engine incremental improvements all the way back to KHTML? It has been more successful than Mozilla.

But again in the Windows ME vs WinNT/Windows2000 case it wasn't a re-write. It was improving an existing product and using it in a consumer space.

But Windows NT itself was a rewrite not an evolution of Windows 3.1.

Windows NT wasn't a rewrite of Windows 3.1, but an attempt of Microsoft to create a modern workstation OS that is in a completely different product category than DOS/Windows 3.1.

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