This fastidious commitment to developer productivity only gets trotted out when it comes to code quality. It’s my experience that shops which are very concerned

This fastidious commitment to developer productivity only gets trotted out when it comes to code quality. It’s my experience that shops which are very concerned about whether maintenance and quality work is an optimal use of developer time also tend to stick them in open offices, saddle their calendars with unproductive meetings, underinvest in tooling, shatter their minds with noisy oncall shifts, impose slow and heavy bureaucratic processes, etc. If that is indeed the real motivation for blocking refactoring projects, it’s a weird place to start.