Yes, a rewrite or replacement is the software analogue of the debt metaphor.
Section 3 of the article elaborates more on the technical debt statement in the TL;DR, but the gist of the argument there is that for a lot of systems, the rewrite is not really an option. Pretending it is an option is a partial contributor to the attitudes that make the debt spiral (or so I argue).
Yes, sometimes a rewrite is possible but the success stories are uncommon and are far outnumbered by failures.
They do maintain the Transformers library which is pretty much the core library for how you interact with LLM models in the open source world. So while they weren't using a model they've trained, they were a part of making just about all of the open models (maybe excluding OpenAI and Google's, I wouldn't be surprised if they have their own frameworks that predate the Transformers library).
Section 3 of the article elaborates more on the technical debt statement in the TL;DR, but the gist of the argument there is that for a lot of systems, the rewrite is not really an option. Pretending it is an option is a partial contributor to the attitudes that make the debt spiral (or so I argue).
Yes, sometimes a rewrite is possible but the success stories are uncommon and are far outnumbered by failures.