> I'll take a step back and realize that the performance of that code does not matter, or that the implementation was the wrong approach and I need to delete it

> I'll take a step back and realize that the performance of that code does not matter, or that the implementation was the wrong approach and I need to delete it all and do something else, or just that it wasn't very important and I should've done the easy solution and moved on. you're lucky, I don't remember a lot of times where following exactly this process did not lead to having to rewrite it 6 months later because it turns out that some user has some corner case which actually ends up requiring data going through that exact codepath in as little time as possible.