Oh don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked in plenty of bad codebases. One job I walked into and on day one the two other senior devs said “congratulations, your share is these 1M lines of code”. It was a total mess. It was back in the day when coldfusion didn’t have functions and instead you called modules that accessed and updated variables in their parents/grandparents directly. There’s nothing more devilish than code that can touch any other part of system. By the time I left there I understood the domain well enough to rewrite that whole system away. I feel your pain.

I’m talking more about how to start things right so you don’t end up in that place. It’s really hard.

And my point still stands that in your codebase, it’s done. The ship has sailed. There’s some comfort in knowing that you’re just going to have to make the most of the restrictions you’re working within (small comfort, I know).