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Newer is generally better form an efficiency perspective compared to older. So any standard that retards people from moving from older to newer is asinine. Thus, you shouldn’t require a person to update everything to code when trying to modernize X. That just makes incremental improvements more expensive.
We see this in other areas. Mandating the best while grandfathering the old leads to suboptimal outcomes.
The fiber I mentioned has been replaced with newer, higher-bandwidth stuff a couple times in the last 40 years. The key value proposition wasn't the fiber itself - it was laying a channel with enough access ports that anyone could run whatever they want through the run for the next hundred years. In this case, the power company paid for the fiber itself, then businesses paid for updates and replacements decades later, and it cost a fraction of what it would have to tear up all the streets and put in new channels everywhere. Like @FiveHourMarathon mentioned in the sibling post, leaving room for expansion and future updates is smart.
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And how much capacity is there to enforce code requirements? The Gestapo isn't keeping track of all this, so you end up with people doing things without permits if doing them with permits costs too much money.
This is how you get anarcho-tyranny. People just end up ignoring the permits and regulations out of necessity, and then the government only goes after easy targets to fine and/or after people they dislike for some other reason.
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