One would presume that 1x is the baseline for 'competence', which is fine, but being able to do something competently vs. making it worse is really an infinite difference.
This isn’t valued everywhere. I worked at a company where doing that kind of work (piling more hacks on top of what’s already there vs taking a step back and seeing if there isn’t a better way to do it while slightly improving what’s already there) was considered over-engineering things and actively discouraged.