With microservices, clean code becomes largely irrelevant compared to other concerns such as logging, monitoring, tracing, API patterns, configurability, scalab

With microservices, clean code becomes largely irrelevant compared to other concerns such as logging, monitoring, tracing, API patterns, configurability, scalability, timeouts, retry logic, circuit breakers, etc. If the code sucks, you can just take 2 days and completely rewrite the codebase, whereas if the microservice doesn't adhere to 12factor.net, you're in for unwelcome surprises. That said, any codebase that has seen a few years of maintenance and further development is going to look complicated, especially if you're too young and inexperienced to recognize that each of the annoying edge cases was put there to fix real production issues. Rewriting sounds like a good fix, but it will take a very long time and in the best case you'll end up with a newer codebase that looks just as complicated to a person just entering the business as the one you were attempting to replace.