Considering someone else did all the actual hard work to build everything in the first place and he was mostly a glorified janitor, that's not really an argument in his favor.

Maintenance is easy. The hard part is actually adding to the existing code - which he almost never did, and when he bothered he'd usually fuck up three things by accident for every one thing he changed deliberately. And about 80% of the changes he made were either completely unnecessarily or mostly unwanted. Most of his changes came across like the most minor things he could occasionally change to justify keeping his job, like a cubicle worker who spends all their time goofing off but suddenly tries to look busy the moment the boss walks by.

If upper management had actually been paying attention and knew anything at all about running a site, he'd have been fired a decade ago.