John quoted The Systems Bible by John Gall
Content warning Section C 11
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
— The Systems Bible by John Gall (Page 63)
This has been true in my experience as well. Often, the growth in complexity leads to fear of loss of features, but starting with something simple and adding complexity is the only way to produce stable results.
A “feature complete rewrite” is a fools errand. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try new things. Instead we should try new, simple, things when the system becomes too complex to work in.