The issue generally isn't just creating something clean but rather it's maintaining something clean. Something that will be owned not by you but by multiple teams whose members change over the course of years.

On a side note, I've found that creating something again usually leads to messes as you try to fix all the issues in the original which just creates new issues.

This seems to always be the case when two alternatives are discussed on HN. The new and shiny is muddled with the new design, so it's hard to tease out where the improvement came from, and in most cases, the new design is possible in the old and trusted.