When you’ve got a billion other tasks to do, you might even know that it could be orders of magnitude faster and still not fix it, simply because of higher prio

When you’ve got a billion other tasks to do, you might even know that it could be orders of magnitude faster and still not fix it, simply because of higher priority work. Frankly, I’d rather spend extra time trying to address problems/bugs/potential security holes in the actual shipped code than in fixing a poorly working CI pipeline...and I’m the kind of dev who gets really irritated by these problems. But you have to prioritize. Basically, barring “external” forces like cost overflow, customer unhappiness, or similar...stuff like that gets fixed at an equilibrium point between how much the problem hurts the dev, how adjacent to the codebase the devs current work is, and how interesting/irritating the dev finds the problem.