I know this is true. But I don’t think “Some parts of important codebases are black boxes. Therefore it’s fine if all of that code base becomes a far bigger black box” sounds like a good argument.

Also, there was probably some human at some point that had some understanding of what they were trying to do and why. The black boxes generally get programmed around after they long left but at the time they had bugs ironed out over decades. (Yes I know sometimes true slop is done over a short period of time and the programmer leaves. But I’ve generally seen the black box built over decades instead).