When you hear about "good" rewrites it's almost never framed in a way that is "the old code is bad and complicated." It's usually driven by an architectural need - for example it started in Python, but now we have scaled up and in order to avoid $1MM/month a rewrite in Go/Rust/C would be beneficial.
Or, in the case of changing marketing needs, it can be "we now better understand our customers and a rewrite can help us provide a more stable interface and help us iterate faster". However in this case a full 100% rewrite is never the case and it's usually done piecemeal or by the new system simply proxying requests to the old system.
When the excuse is simply the "code is a mess", then not only are you admitting that the original team failed to design a maintainable system, you are also trusting them to not make the same mistake again. And if their whole motivation is "the code is a mess", they will probably fuck up the redesign, as messy code is a symptom of bad design but not the root cause. If the root cause is burnout, and that isn't addressed, the rewrite may be just as bad.