I understand your sentiment of justifying not being "old". but you gotta bring up "legacy code".
"Working Effectively with Legacy Code" defines legacy code as code without tests thus hard to change it easily or with confidence.
So either @TheGuardian is discussing about the age of software relative to his/her perspective or confused "legacy code" without understanding deno code base.
It's relative measurement. When you are 9th grader, even a freshman college student feels way older.
But as you are in your 30s, you feel less of difference.
Same thing here, How do you define Windows and Emacs being "old"? For those who's been using it for decades, not as old as Voyager software. For those who lived through those times, Windows and Emacs feels younger.
See where I am going with it?
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If you have a nephew or a kid, they will say you are "old". But your parents will consider you "young" for the rest of their lives.
I think 8 years is old for software that has heavily Web based like Deno. But Windows and Emacs have had portions of their lifetime without the Web in a meaningful way, so 8 years would be young.
This is not a universally accepted definition. I've owned plenty of services with 95%+ unit test coverage, massive integ test suites, and synthetic canary tests that ran every minute that I would consider legacy. Plenty of AI slop today gets barfed out with 100% test coverage, but much of it is legacy from day 1.
What would you consider legacy? (not trynna fight, just wondering what you consider as one)
An example could be old API endpoints only hit by old versions of a mobile app where users may be slow to update. Or a case where only newer clients/instances support modern features and old ones are stuck on a frozen featureset until they cutover.
But active services with no immediately existant alternative may also be legacy. If your auth is behind a disappointing managed service like AWS Cognito, you may consider your entire auth stack legacy while the replacement is still looming in the roadmap down the line. Maybe you can't justify funding to work on a transition just yet, but you already would avoid building on top of the existing tech stack.