The main value a big bang rewrite has is that for six to eight months the dev team gets a break from being asked a lot of uncomfortable questions. By the time the questions get properly uncomfortable again, you’ve worked there long enough for it to be reasonable for you to leave.
Incremental improvements require more skill. The sorts of skills that make you a better developer. So even though it’s more difficult, it’s much more valuable to all parties for you to attempt it.
The only reason for a rewrite is when you have a language or framework that’s dead, and there are often other dynamics that put you in that spot in the first place.
There are a bunch of common mistakes people make with trees that take years off their life expectancy. The worst guarantee the tree will be dead in twenty years (and potentially dangerous before that). Software has similar phenomenon, on a much shorter time scale.
