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You have a lot of good points and some of it may have been applicable in my case.

But this was not complicated. I have underestimated refactors before, this was not one of those times. This was a simple little thing, just getting some data from point A to point B. It would have been easy to verify that the new solution generated the same pages (data in db tables) as the old one.

I didnt undermine anyone. I brought it up in a team meeting, I didn't take it to the department head. Sure I had been told no, but that no was based on the assumption that I was wrong about being able to replace it easily. My weekend coding was simply to prove that it could be done, which I did whether anyone believes me or not.

I really like your last paragraph. You didn't just say no, you walked through it with them and helped them see the problem. I am convinced that the only real reason this did not go through was because nobody else understood the problem. None of our team members had worked with that particular component, everyone were about as new as myself and dismissing my concerns without consideration. Most of all the team lead who hadn't written a line of code in decades and had absolutely no concern for code quality. The review mechanic in that team was push to test, have lead click through website to see if it seems to work, push to prod. Lead did not give a shit what the code was like. The quality of their projects reflected that.

We had over a dozen different apps and pretty much all of them were chock full of bad code written by unsupervised juniors on a tight deadline. All the apps used the same CMS in the backend but nearly all of them had a different frontend approach because they just let people pick whatever - one day you're working in Vue, today it's react, now it's angular, here's a svelte app, this ones just using jQuery and here's one just using vanilla JS. While I was there they let another guy start using a different CMS for another new app, because we didn't have enough problems with all the different js frameworks already, let's start using different backend frameworks too!

Hardly a single test suite anywhere except what I'd made. Everywhere I looked I found bugs and terrible code, every task I got I had to start by figuring out today's flavour of JS framework then try to understand how some junior using this project to pad their CV with the newest JS framework had mangled it together into a somewhat usable website and then how to make the changes I needed to make which 90% of the time was 29 times harder than it should have been because the entire thing was a complete mess hacked together asap and then duct taped, Jerry rigged and beaten with a hammer periodically over it's years of service.

I moved on from that team pretty quickly, and got into a different team much more in tune with my views. About a year later I was talking with two of my old team mates who had been somewhat annoyed with me and all my nagging about testing and code quality back then, at that point they had worked on some of my solutions and felt the benefits of the tests I'd created and the way I actually organized my code to make it easier to understand and work with. It took me by surprise when they flat out, unprompted just told me I was right. When I was working there I had a hard time because everyone disagreed with things I considered basic facts, I started to doubt myself. Luckily the next team was already doing all those things I wanted to do and more. Now I know that good code does exist, the methods I advocate do work, I wasn't just imagining things. That other team was just badly managed.

That's not to say everything I've ever done has been gold, I've made bad decisions and learned from them. But I stand by replacing that old integration library and I still don't believe in this "legacy code" mindset where changing some old pile of crap requires buy-in from multiple different stakeholders and so on.

I might get it when we're talking about large complex, business critical systems that really do require weeks or months of work just to replace a small part. But what I'm talking about is a small website developed in a matter of weeks that's hardly much more than a glorified pdf and where the code behind it has absolutely no business being as complex as it is. Even if my suggested change had broken some requirements they would have been quick to fix because the new code was clear and simple. And the worst case scenario would probably be some messed up formatting in a small article that hardly anyone is going to read anyway.

It should not have been a big deal.