The biggest stakeholder is change and accumulated cruft. The usefulness of code also drifts over time as the users, business, or paradigms/ecosystem changes.

The biggest stakeholder is change and accumulated cruft. The usefulness of code also drifts over time as the users, business, or paradigms/ecosystem changes. Most new code should be considered throw away until it's proven useful to end users. Once useful it can merged into 'stable' tree that should have high standards. Ideally 'stable' is capped at a certain size per the number of engineers and so to move code in requires refactoring or deleting dead or less useful code. The balance you want is to maintain high velocity but also allow for maintainability and core stability.