I think that's why I'm being downvoted too, but frankly if the codebase is so bad that something is being copy/pasted hundreds of times to the point of unmainta

I think that's why I'm being downvoted too, but frankly if the codebase is so bad that something is being copy/pasted hundreds of times to the point of unmaintainability, the abstractions that same team would build would probably also be disastrous, and much harder to deal with. Is that preferable? But tbh, I'm skeptical of the premise to begin with. It's still easier to gradually consolidate 100 slightly different uses of a pattern than blindly create an abstraction that adequately covers those 100 uses. If your team is useless, it's better that their code be fragmented and atomic anyway, because big mistakes are inevitable. You don't want to make it hard to touch those mistakes. You want that code to be uncoupled & disposable. But at that point the argument is getting pretty abstract. Depends on the specific codebase.