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A new starter's first week is the closest thing most teams have to a clean-room test of their documentation. Treat the README as the first pull request: run the setup, capture the friction and merge the fixes while the memory is fresh.
Every December, a team somewhere deploys one last 'small change' and then disappears until January. A short, honest runbook is the cheapest insurance you can buy — and it takes an afternoon, not a quarter.
Most teams have a roadmap for new things and a shrug for the work that keeps existing things alive. This is a pitch for a formal maintenance budget: a protected slice of sprint capacity for upgrades, patching and proven tooling, framed as delivery insurance rather than nostalgia.
British indirectness has a habit of leaking into code review, where it turns into comments too vague to act on or too apologetic to be useful. A practical taxonomy for blocking versus non-blocking feedback, plus the templates that keep pull requests honest, kind and moving.
Repair cafés fix toasters instead of binning them. The same instincts — understand before replacing, mend in place, share the knowledge — work surprisingly well on a fifteen-year-old codebase, and cost a lot less than the rewrite nobody can scope.