On this spectrum, there's also "read by refactoring" (https://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/read-by-refactoring/ https://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/read-by-refactori

On this spectrum, there's also "read by refactoring" (https://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/read-by-refactoring/ https://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/read-by-refactoring/). You'll need good refactoring tooling and good versioning (as you'll almost certainly want to discard many of your trial refactorings) but I've found that the approach helps me evaluate how my mental model matches up with reality. It also generally leads to a more readable codebase too