I think that refactoring is often used as a means to better understand code. This might be your own code that you wrote yesterday or it might be someone else's

I think that refactoring is often used as a means to better understand code. This might be your own code that you wrote yesterday or it might be someone else's code from 3 years ago. In order to really understand a piece of code, some of us need to put their hands on it. But I think throwing away the changes should be an option if there's no objective improvement. Very often those changes end up on the main branch but they only cause changes, not improvements. The real outcome is in someone's head.