No, that's kind of the trick of it. To be able to do this, the thing you create has to be, on a base level, insanely efficient compared to what came before. You're frontloading years of optimizations in one big leap.

On top of that solid basis, you can introduce artificial inefficiencies, and then gradually remove them.

But you can't do the trick at all, if your rewrite doesn't start off being an orders-of-magnitude efficiency improvement.

yes :)