I would say that over a decade of my career was coming in as a freelancer to fix codebases where a couple of people tought they knew better than the previous ones and proceeded to add yet another very different block to a codebase already spaghetiffied by a couple such people.

Sometimes it was coding style, sometimes it was software design, sometimes it was even a different language.

I reckon thinking that just deploying one's EliteZ skills on top of an existing code base without actually refactoring the whole thing will make it better is a phase we all go through when we're still puppy-coders.