I was working on a project with another more senior developer and I remember saying we should refactor some part of the code or design it differently somehow an

I was working on a project with another more senior developer and I remember saying we should refactor some part of the code or design it differently somehow and he said "Why, it already works?" The only argument I could really come up with involved too many coding buzzwords to be taken seriously and we moved on to the next task. That's kind of stuck with me. Whenever I'm thinking about a code change or "clever" design I just try and see if there's a justification beyond something involving words like "abstract" or "cohesion".