On the topic of old temporary solutions, how is the hacky solutions explained when a new hire is brought in to work on a game or an entire new guard comes in to keep an older game updated with content or running? Do you get a bunch of instructions like “don’t touch this code from E3 2018, as everything breaks when anything changes it” or is learning old code debt left to trial and error for new blood?

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People don't often question why things are the way they are. We typically accept the explanation of "these things have always been this way" as a valid reason for most things, and that includes the tribal people who didn't eat certain things out of tradition and not because they knew that those forbidden foods were poisonous or toxic.

In my experience all code, hacky or not, tends to be like Chesterton's Fence. You are best served not modifying or changing it until you know why it's there. This is primarily because of unforeseen side effects or other parts of the codebase that assume that code is functioning, and the cost for breaking things in an unknown manner is so great compared to leaving a load-bearing hack alone and working around it. Engineers are typically expected to be able to read and decipher code on their own. If they get stuck or don't understand something, they are expected to ask for help. Tribal knowledge built up over time within the workforce is incredibly important to keeping things running. Without that passing of knowledge from senior to junior, you end up with the population of Idiocracy where they use tools and devices but have no idea how they work.

This is also why it's nigh impossible to take an existing game project and hand it over to completely different team and expect them to be able to figure it out. When you've got dependencies and systems without documentation and pitfalls everywhere, you could have engineers spend years trying (unsuccessfully) to figure out how it all works together. This actually happened at a former employer - they got the rights to an entire codebase and asset depot from a shut-down licensed MMOG that the higher-ups wanted to try to resurrect and reskin, but a couple of very senior engineers spent over a year unsuccessfully trying to get the entire workflow working and the entire attempt was eventually scrapped.

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