I've seen many people treat software like some sort of art project, and spend much time refactoring things, rewriting perfectly functioning systems, and general

I've seen many people treat software like some sort of art project, and spend much time refactoring things, rewriting perfectly functioning systems, and generally creating little to nothing of value and generating tons of meaningless churn. While the article doesn't offer specific examples, it's probably talking about this sort of stuff. e.g. "perfecting code, often code that hadn’t been touched in years and didn’t need to be touched". This sounds like a classic "oh, this isn't how I would have written it, so let me just refactor everything here". "Not how I would have written it" does not equal "bad". This isn't making the code better, less bug-free, or "more perfect" in any way. Actually, it often introduces bugs.