I think I understand where the author is coming from. I have not done a lot of rewrites but the largest one I did was an application for maintaining and generating our product catalog. The original design had split North America and international catalogs into different files that were 95% the same and these had to stay in sync. Other oddities of the old system had page numbers manually adjusted when new pages were inserted and a hand maintained table of contents. All together there were 12 different catalogs generated and each one had a manual process of importing new pricing before being generated.

What kicked off the project was a desire to correct the amount of manual labor required for generating new books but as soon as the project was proposed we had a VP that wanted to justify the project by doing something more. Now more was a little hand wavy but the concrete things were color pictures and automatically generating and laying out the entire catalog automatically. The problem was there was no data for either of these task; we had no color pictures and there was no repository of product attributes to automatically lay out the catalog.

The break in the project that made it become possible for success was that the VP with hand wavy dreams left the company and I was able to start work on a rewrite that solved the important pain points without adding the overhead of multiple departments coordinating taking new pictures and and building a PIM with the required attributes.

It has been been five years since we went live with the new catalog and the color pictures are around 50% of the book now, and the PIM has is getting rolled into and entirely different project. If we had waited then we would still be waiting on the benefits that kicked off the project in the first place.