Aside from there being no crises, rewriting a set of utilities with nearly no bug reports for years and for which no new features is needed accomplishes what exactly? Aside from new bugs, that is.

There surely would be a more beneficial undertaking somewhere else. If then you’d argue that they may do as they please with their time, fair, but then let’s not pretend this rewrite has any objective value aside from scratching personal itches and learning how cat and co are implemented.

In my experience the crisis comes more from an influx of people who wants to change everything without having read or caring for specifications and portability. There is however a lack of people like to clean the dirty stuff behind them.