I agree this is ideal, but my point is, there were instances where you try to cleanup, and you end up pulling an infinite thread because the feature you're work

I agree this is ideal, but my point is, there were instances where you try to cleanup, and you end up pulling an infinite thread because the feature you're working on is stacked on top of 10 other features, each of which were duct taped together, and product forgot about this, and they think if it's working it must be very straightforward to just add this one thing. Your choice is to duct tape again or to refactor the 10 features. So you dare change one like of code that optimizes one of the previous features and the reviewer asks you to also optimize A, encapsulate B and replace method C with new and improved method D that does some of what you need but you now need to rework your solution to conform to that. So I often leave that semicolon alone.