For the company I work in the daytime for and the company I moonlight for, this has been the case in both situations. The looming nature of legacy code, especially with prohibitively work-expensive policies lead to much more than bad programmer effectiveness. It lead to lots of extra lead-time on deployments, heavily decreased morale, and when we lost our two rockstar-20/30-year developers, turnover exploded.

There's more to it more often than not than just policies and the amount of legacy code, but even when we had the most supportive of managers, morale was very low over it. I definitely think companies, as they age and go from startup to a firmly placed company, should really take stock of their code assets and policies and really make sure they're kept up-to-standard yearly, and really look at every policy and make sure it's absolutely needed. It's a lot easier than taking a 1 line project on a 9 year old piece of code and turning it from a half-day full-review to a 6 day haltingly slow process.