Thank you for your reply! I am sorry I missed it and failed to comment in time.
First of all, it is not worth it to invest in my case. It was a freelance task, as simple as "this app works OK but outdated, can you please update slightly and post to appstore". Fixing hundreds of lines of code (which is not documented BTW) was just too expensive for my customer, so we decided to leave it as is 8)
Thing is... my case was relatively simple, however, if you have a major project - you can imagine how painful is it to fix 100+k lines of code manually. Anyway, it looks like we have no other options but to keep an old intel mac as a backup, or manually fix... which is sad.