> Dialogues like this make me feel like I'm in some surreal universe where all software evolved around one giant mainframe, and now, centuries later, everyone is still programming in COBOL, and it's illegal to not be backward compatible.

Being backward compatible is a feature in a legal system (e.g. forbidding ex post facto laws). Moreover, it's entirely possible to change the Constitution in any way one wishes, simply by passing an amendment. What you can't do is claim that it says what it doesn't, any more than one could run an amd64 Linux kernel directly on a 68000[1].

The Constitution's not perfect. It wasn't when it passed, which is why the Bill of Rights was required. It still wasn't, which is why further amendments were required (e.g., that banning slavery in most cases). Some of the changes were themselves suboptimal (e.g. the 17th Amendment, which has been a catastrophe, or the 18th, which banned alcohol). It's perfectly fine to amend the Constitution to fix it (e.g. the 21st Amendment, which repealed the fundamentally flawed 18th), but one can't just read whatever one wants into the document (c.f. drug prohibition: if an amendment were required to ban alcohol, then one must be required to ban drugs; and yet here we are).

[1] Yes, I'm sure that someone could in fact come up with a bitstream which is both valid amd64 opcodes and valid 68000 opcodes, and that someone could use that substrate to implement some sort of half-assed, tortured 'Linux' kernel. You know what I meant.