The objective is to serve the requirements. The code, inasmuch as it “works”, doesn’t need to change. But the cases I enumerated are ones which frequently enabl

The objective is to serve the requirements. The code, inasmuch as it “works”, doesn’t need to change. But the cases I enumerated are ones which frequently enable me to better serve requirements than making no changes. If a given bug fix takes N hours because the underlying code is hard to understand and maintain, it only takes a certain multiple of N before it’s prudent to invest some of those hours into making future fixes possible in N minutes instead. At a certain point, precluding changes on principle is directly opposed to serving requirements.