It is kind of mentioned in the article but I think a lot of developers don't realise that there isn't just good code and bad code, there is a whole spectrum and the position on this spectrum is dictated by skill, experience, time pressure, money pressure and shifting requirements (assuming you ever had any!).

We pine for the perfect green field where all things are good but there are probably zero companies where all developers are expert, where the solutions are all unique and unambiguous, where the trade-off between maintainability/performance and speed of coding are all completely set in stone, where nothing has ever changed in strategy, framework, etc. where no framework update has ever broken something and needed some dirty hack to work around it, where you don't have managers come and go who are not 100% helpful or useful.

So better to look forwards always. Don't try and fix what is there unless it needs changing to move forwards. A lot of the code I have wanted to rewrite in my current company will be toast in the next 2 years as we are writing new apps so just don't lose sleep over it.