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Egotistical engineers always think this time things will be different, because they're smart enough to do it right. The reality is that every rewrite brings a new and different set of problems that need to be addressed. You don't escape problems by scrapping it all and starting over and this is one of the most valuable lessons to learn as an engineer.

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You don't need to be egotistical to see that you can do things better the second time around because you've learned stuff along the way. In this case, the writer provided multiple examples of how they were able to use the lessons they'd learned from the old codebase to improve the new one. They did, in fact, escape some of their problems. Did they introduce new problems? I'm sure they did, but they're probably still better off overall.

Sometimes ego is involved, but sometimes rewriting is just the rational thing to do from a cost/benefit standpoint.

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