[mhomde]

Some developers think that, and unfortunately a lot of methodology enforces that thinking.

Cleaning up code as you go should be a habit I agree. It's slightly trickier when code reaches a "boiling frog" point and you need to take a look at the bigger picture and perhaps re-architecture. It often easy to keep chugging away at the tree's and not seeing the forest.

The downside with the scope of those kind of structural refactoring is that they touch a lot of code, so they're perceived as "risky".

Also developers get attached to the architecture they have learnt and know, and don't want to re-learn, even if the simplified code would be easier to learn for someone new