I have learned this to be true from work on my open source projects. I tried to explain this concept at my previous employer and my boss looked at me like I was stupid. Stupid makes sense when you justify your existence according to story points.

What I have noticed from the travel industry is that backend developers tend to write a ton of original code and rarely refactor anything as though they are scared an improvement is always a regression. Frontend developers tended to not refactor anything either, but then they were scared to write any code at all (note: I am a frontend developer).

Part of this fear was justified because their automation was shitty. Often things were properly code reviewed, but changes would only be accepted with the smallest possible footprint. It hurts when the diff is a static text comparison counting every character, which means a bunch of comments explaining things or white space changes looks like a ton of code changes. It also keeps you from removing unnecessary code or reorganizing things. The killer though were frameworks for everything including test automation in various different flavors for the same sorts of things, which is like writing tests for testing of tests. In this case testing became a block to check off that had little or no real value.