What people need to do to get their job done is very, very, frequently to work around an existing mess with new hacks that make the mess even harder to clean up. And if that's what they need to do, then they should do it.

But we should also ask ourselves how to get into such messes less often. That is, how to systematically reduce the number of early-stage design errors. One trick is to choose tools that forbid known anti-patterns.

That means the designers must work harder up-front to figure out a system that can do without the work-arounds. But that is a feature, not a bug; indeed that is what our processes should try to achieve.

There are very few justified usages that require to write maze of rewrite rules.

Most people do it because they have no idea what they are doing and they never decided on a naming convention for their apps and domains.

What are some justified uses of rewrite rules?

Making broken links pointing at your site work (301), without breaking links to the correct URL.

Especially links on sites you have no control over.