[ramblerman]

I disagree. From personal experience when working with production systems fear is usually much more prevalent. Often a refactor will bring about benefits that are only realized by the dev team. The business side doesn't really care that you just removed duplicate code/added technology x. But they will notice immediately when something breaks. This leads to a high risk low reward environment where "dont fix it if it aint broke" is a viable survival strategy.

In cases like this I think the advice is extremely solid.