As far as the balance sheet, less code means lower costs and more projects from development. Because it costs less to maintain less code than it does large, convoluted codebases. Are you better off with a codebase that has similar value (functionality) but much lower maintenance costs? The value of a codebase is the functionality it provides, not the number of lines of code in use.

Instinctively management will try to through more resources at a problem instead of paying off technical debt before it becomes unwieldy.