100% agreed. Most code complaints are this code sucks. But honestly most code looks like shit, and battle tested code that's been heavily patched to work well

100% agreed. Most code complaints are this code sucks. But honestly most code looks like shit, and battle tested code that's been heavily patched to work well and cover lots of special cases especially lookS like shit. But when there is a documented problem with a piece of code that is important and worth refactoring because it can't be mediated otherwise then of course you need to fix it. For example recently a previous dev split the data model across persisted HTML and rows in a database. Which means it was very easy for the domain critical computations(driven by the database) to display one set of inputs to the user, but calculate with another.