I can confirm this 100%. Having worked at an old (19 years) Java code-base full of unnecessary patterns & abstractions. Even with really great refactoring help from the IDEA, making meaningful changes is very very time consuming. I've spent weeks on it. The complexity was creeping in over the years and is almost impossible to get out again. But it has types!!!11!

And if I then look at the actual data transformations behind all this code: It would be a 2 day exercise in Clojure to re-build this from scratch.