I don't think that follows at all. I've seen my share of development groups where someone had previously made a bad hire or brought in the wrong consultants and that had left them with a body of code that simply wasn't very good. That doesn't necessarily reflect the overall culture at the organisation and it doesn't say anything about whether the people currently available would make the same mistakes.

The assumption that a big rewrite would be too expensive and end up with the same problems is itself quite dangerous. Some of those groups I mentioned knew very well they had a pile of junk but management had apparently read the usual advocacy about how Big Rewrites Are Bad and stubbornly insisted on adapting the existing code instead of recognising that it should be written off. They spent far more time and money on the updates than it would have taken to do a clean rewrite. And then they got into this kind of sunk cost fallacy where because they'd spent months doing what should have been weeks of work once they then became even more attached to the flawed code and kept repeating the same mistake.