[alisonkisk]

"left alone" corresponds to how it was designed. Your task is to push the code a little closer to the design, which always has compromises in implementation.

The big fights come in (as seen in comments in this post already) when there was no original design, and it's mess vs possibly dubious attempts to clean up the mess.

[joncampbelldev]

I think another possibility in addition to what you mentioned is that the original design was incorrect, or even just not very optimal. Just as an aside.

However this is all becoming a wide ranging statement about the entire job of a dev team. So far removed from the extremely innocuous advice of the article around "make small improvements regularly". Whilst you can apply caveats to that around "test your improvements", "check your improvement with others more familiar with that code" etc etc, these are all things that should be expected of a professional. At the risk of talking about no-true-scotsman.

If someone cannot be trusted with the advice "make small improvements regularly" then what the f* can they be trusted with?