The author makes a very crucial point about legacy code — it's often simply code that's old. No addendums added. Standards and conventions change over time, especially so in, say, modern web development, and it's in everyone's best interest to practice empathy when interfacing with it.
Even more so when the code really isn't a good match to the standards at that point in time — there's a lot of context missing (deadlines, meetings, management and more) and code only shows a single aspect of a project.
