IMO ideal code is code that looks like the problem it's trying to solve. Really good code will be faster to write than the user stories; it resembles pseudocode

IMO ideal code is code that looks like the problem it's trying to solve. Really good code will be faster to write than the user stories; it resembles pseudocode. A lot of bad refactoring is sort of like putting Chair as a subclass of Dog because both have four legs. Or someone thinking that long paragraphs have high cognitive load, so all paragraphs are split into 2-3 lines. In this scenario, OP simply changed the code without understanding what problem it was meant to solve. It's not about trading readability for flexibility, or respect or anything. It's that the code was probably further from solving the problem.