Your last paragraph sums it up well, in my opinion. Too often the answer chosen is to "add a new configuration setting", which means one more thing for ops to k

Your last paragraph sums it up well, in my opinion. Too often the answer chosen is to "add a new configuration setting", which means one more thing for ops to keep track of and one more potential cause of failure for devs to investigate. Cleaning up dead/deprecated code and working to consolidate code paths provides opportunity to clean up obsolete configuration settings, remove special cases, and improve the reasonability and maintainability of the software into the future.