>From experience, those announcing that a codebase is bad sounds more resume-driven than technical. It sounds like they want to make a mark more than making a functional difference.
Graybeard here (been doing development for money for 40+ years). It's one thing to say a codebase is bad because of style, aesthetics or lack of comment; it's another to try to enumerate what that means. To me, a codebase is bad when it's hard to modify and hard to unit/integration test because of the architectural decisions that were made (which boil down to it not being properly layered and modular, overusing inheritance vs composition, using inscrutable variable names, etc).
Graybeard here (been doing development for money for 40+ years). It's one thing to say a codebase is bad because of style, aesthetics or lack of comment; it's another to try to enumerate what that means. To me, a codebase is bad when it's hard to modify and hard to unit/integration test because of the architectural decisions that were made (which boil down to it not being properly layered and modular, overusing inheritance vs composition, using inscrutable variable names, etc).