But.. all these things do work in the real world. Keeping refactorings to a separate commit is important as when you break something, you can just roll it back.

But.. all these things do work in the real world. Keeping refactorings to a separate commit is important as when you break something, you can just roll it back. Countless times I've seen new people come in and try refactoring things to their liking as they work on some other feature. Then when it later breaks some component they didn't know about, we have to unpick their commit and manually separate out the crap 'refactoring' they did and the actual feature they were working on. End to end tests are great to test the system actually works as expected as per the requirements spec. You should know how to write this, else.. how are you even testing your feature to begin with after you've written it? And big rewrites always take longer than people think, which can sink a business if they're not careful with their resources and don't manage their time appropriately. All in all, these points you've mentioned all seem actually very reasonable to me.