I was stuck maintaining a solution using an abandonware internal transport layer built on technology that died in 2004 and an abandoned ORM on an EAV schema database over SOAP backend in 2022 with much the same "no business value in it" argument. "We're trying to sell the company so profit is of the most importance" transitioned into "we bought you because you make money". So instead we increased our maintenance exposure by adding more necessary features to the wobbly pile (or 'fixing' broken ones) as opposed to resolving the mistakes made over twenty years ago.

Of course the dickhead architect would use articles like this OP as justification for why all of this wasn't a problem.