[cj]

>You don’t need to consider the cost they could drive during that time.

You don't need to, but you 100% should. "Opportunity cost" (cost of not doing something) is real.

This is the problem with all refactoring/migration projects. It's very easy to get a lot of people to agree a company should migrate from Node to Go or Monolith to Microservices (or to clean up a mountain of tech debt), but it's much harder to justify the time it takes away from building things your users care about.

[hibikir]

True, but often the project that was supposed to build something users care about turns to dust. On one side, you have rosy projections. On the other, a cap on gains, so sure everyone picks the first, but nobody measures if it worked.

One can build a great career working only on key, promising initiatives that never amount to any value in the end. By the time it's clear the project lost money outright, you are on to something else.