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I think this is a pretty reasonable set of counter points, even if I don't agree with them.

Being part of team incremental rewrite, myself, I'd say that you're overestimating the cost of the incremental rewrite and underestimating the cost of the rewrite.

For your first 2 points especially, I'd argue if you can't even begin to incrementally rewrite a system, you're in no position to begin to plan a full rewrite.

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It is mainly a matter of decision making. In my case, no refactoring was ever sanctioned by itself. Devs were having been allowed to refactor anything on a small scale and always backed up by a feature request. So when the desire to somehow "heal" the codebase is met, it is usually because it is already too "dead" to work with in the first place.

I'm not sure what you mean by your last sentence.

I'd say that if code is being used in production it's not yet "dead", and it should be a much higher priority for team members to work with it.

Can you not add additional tests? Refactor out even a single feature at a time into more modern tech?

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