Is there a significant amount of people not working on code that already exists? That's like the total opposite of my experience
- none of the original authors are with the company anymore.
- it's written in a language/using a stack/using technology that is used absolutely nowhere else in the company anymore.
- it is big enough that migrating all of its functionality is a tremendously difficult undertaking, to the point where it's likely never going to get done, at least not in your lifetime (either in terms of your tenure at the company, or literally, before you die.)
Outdated architecture/code practices/patterns are a smaller smell, as is the lack of documentation/testing - but those can be present even in greenfield projects written by a big enough dipshit - and I say this having been that dipshit at several points in my career :)
The other members kept producing new code and debugging new code.
Disregarding of whether it's fair or not, there was a kind of balance that kept the boat floating.
I left since then and it wouldn't surprise me if the legacy was being rewritten from scratch (and over-engineered).
Back when people mandated an 80 character line width because their CRT monitors only had so much resolution