I am grateful that you have taken it upon yourself to engage in this topic. I know how much effort it takes to argue against such a tide, and standing your ground so firmly is admirable at the very least. I also appreciate and understand that you may have code you don’t feel like refactoring, and I completely agree that a feature should be marked deprecated before being removed. But I assure you, and I say this with the utmost sincerity, that I am junior to you only in age. That is not to say I may outdo you in this or that kind of task, but that I have seen and dealt with enough code, both legacy and up to date, to be able to objectively conclude which code is and is not pretty. One might argue that beauty is relative, and prettiness of code in peers of the similar level of experience may very well be, but generally, a senior will likely be able to recognize pretty (and, by extension, ugly) code sooner than a junior.
Just as we once considered crinoline supported dresses to be what gives women the default of beauty and elegance, and doctors recommended cigarettes as a good solution to that nasty cough, so too can code standards change and we can alter opinions on what good, healthy and pretty code should look like. Not based on feeling or a mere whim, but based on research and countless experiences in the field.
I would argue, therefore, that code that has the potential to confuse, even the least bit, is uglier than code which is effective.