[zoul]

If it was allowed, somebody would have done it.

People are often scared, don’t care or don’t know how to. I have found it best to include a batch of refactoring each time I touched something during development. (Because adding features or fixing bugs requires understanding the part of the code, so you may as well improve it since you already have it in your head.) This makes everything take more time, but that has to be expected when dealing with a lot of technical debt.

A huge +1 for TypeScript. I usually work in a well-typed language (Swift), but have been recently working in JavaScript and it was amazing how much TypeScript improves the situation. I can’t imagine working on a serious code base without types. (Some people can.)