In my experience the likelihood of your scenario (increasing resistance to refactoring) is almost always indirectly proportional to the amount and quality of r

In my experience the likelihood of your scenario (increasing resistance to refactoring) is almost always indirectly proportional to the amount and quality of refactoring tools available. 500KLOC JVM/.NET application? No big deal. 50KLOC JS/HTML-based SPA? Pfooooh. That could take a while...do we really need to?