[wwind123]

On one hand, I understand that some old code is hard to delete because it's hard to detangle a lot of the legacy dependency. On the other hand, too much useless old code existing in the code base by itself could become a big maintenance burden for both humans and AI. In some cases at some point it might become more economical to just invest a bunch of resource to detangle the dependencies to be able to remove the old code.

[hasyimibhar]

At huge companies, it's hard to prioritize this because it's hard to pin dollar values to removing legacy code, while it's easier to show how building feature X will earn the company $Y amount of revenue. And because of that, there is also no incentive to do it, you don't get promoted by deleting old code, you get promoted by showing how your effort helped contribute to company revenue. At my previous company (100+ engineers, hundreds of microservices), teams that regularly clean legacy codebase tend to be platform teams (cost centers), while teams that struggle to get these prioritized are product vertical teams (revenue centers).