[Cyberdog]

The “cleanup pass” never happens, though. It’ll just be new feature on top of new feature until it’s too large to refactor.

[dymk]

You're describing a problem that's plagued corporate software development for decades. You just get to the "unmaintainable ball of mud" stage faster now. Every few days I spent a while on codebase architecture improvements after landing a slew of features.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

That's a leadership failure not a technical failure. If you can't dig your heels in and force time to tidy up technical debt then you need to find someone who can and let them take over as PM.

[colordrops]

Except it does. It's not some law of physics. I've done exactly this on multiple projects, both personal and corporate.