Strong disagree. This is something people say to sound clever. It’s not true at all. The real cause is basic entropy and complexity are always increasing. Rarely does a project manager request a feature be deleted. This is compounded by most companies having a few good programmers and mostly mediocre programmers, so the codebase will tend toward the mean over time.

Hm... Ad hominem, truism, truism, ad hominem. And not even disagreeing with the conclusion in the end...

I'd say false dilemma fallacy.

so ... sounds like you agree?

What is the alternative? Bad code?

It's exactly same as arguing you should not educate your workers. Cause they might leave. So you get only the least knowledgeable ones.

It's really not.

Software solves business problems. Code that meets its requirements needs to be left alone. Developers just changing code because they feel like it need some coaching. They're wasting everybody's time for reasons that amount to "I like it My Way".

So, with normally performing developers, the only code that changes is the code that needs to change. Good or bad only has an influence on the cost of a change.

That's not inconsistent with "good code will get rewritten until it's not good code." Good code that you need to change is code that can degrade as a result of that change.

Nothing to do with "just changing code because they feel like it".

The good code will be changed after it has ceased to be good code too. And bad code can become good code in the process of changing it.

There is nothing that makes good code more or less likely to change than bad code.