Confirmed it a few times. Far less often than it gets blamed, though. The check that settles it lives in Search Console rather than the rank tracker. Filter to the page and compare the last three months year over year, reading impressions and average position separately. Real decay is a slow position slide across most of the page's queries while impressions for the topic hold steady. If impressions fell as well, demand moved, and no rewrite brings that back. Position stepping down around update dates is just re-scoring. It bounces inside a range instead of trending.
Before touching anything, search the main query and honestly compare what ranks now against what ranked when the page did well. Sometimes the results are a different content type now. The page did not decay, the query left it behind, and that situation needs a different page rather than a refresh.
The preemptive rewrites are the part that would worry me. A rewrite resets everything at once, so if the drop continues you now have two variables and no answer. Losing a couple of weeks confirming the cause is cheap next to rewriting a page that was never the problem.
