This is still making a spectacular number of assumptions about other people's work environments. The technical debt they're dealing with may not even have been

This is still making a spectacular number of assumptions about other people's work environments. The technical debt they're dealing with may not even have been theirs in the first place, it could be an external codebase. It could be a dependency that's long since abandoned and is now a security risk. It could be that the project is deployed against a really old DB and the feature requested needs that upgrading. It could be any one of an almost infinite number of things that none of your scenarios seem to be aware of.