alt Hacker NewsHere's a study from the southern Appalachian Mountains that found that even in forests that were logged over 100 years ago, species richness and abundance was still lower than in forests that had never been logged:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248428489_Centuries...
if we're doing analogies to other complex systems, forests which have been patched and patched by different maintainers over the year are likely to have a lot of built up cruft, overlapping APIs, bloat, and of course a rewrite results in cleaned up code.