No matter how insane a code base looks, (unless it is totally inoperable) it is meeting a lot of conditions that are more important than whatever you are fixing but won't be recognized as important until you break them.
Those conditions built up over time and were changed irrationally by business decisions and hit or miss communication. A lot of demoralizing for anyone who was trying to keep standards while meeting requests.. Don't beat up the past maintainers for a past you can't know in much detail.
Maintaining old code can be fun though and is a more interesting puzzle game than most new development. Just try to stay emotionally neutral and unattached to anything about the code besides the specific challenges as they need tackling.
No matter how insane a code base looks, (unless it is totally inoperable) it is meeting a lot of conditions that are more important than whatever you are fixing but won't be recognized as important until you break them.
Those conditions built up over time and were changed irrationally by business decisions and hit or miss communication. A lot of demoralizing for anyone who was trying to keep standards while meeting requests.. Don't beat up the past maintainers for a past you can't know in much detail.
Maintaining old code can be fun though and is a more interesting puzzle game than most new development. Just try to stay emotionally neutral and unattached to anything about the code besides the specific challenges as they need tackling.