we say bit rot as if it's just a natural process of decline and the inevitable slide into entropic oblivion
but unless we're talking about the physical degradation of the actual medium or once-in-a-lifetime events like cosmic ray bit flipping, every new misalignment of APIs, every new broken code path, every everything going slightly more wrong than it did yesterday is a human-driven event
we should really call it code litter
and eventually, one day, if you want a neglected system to work again you have to declutter, unfuck your habitat, "does it spark joy", burn the damn place down until that big ball of mud is a green field again