What I see is that the code bases that don’t get cleaner over time either go away, or calcify and the maintainers spend most of their energy on talking people out of changing anything.

I’ve worked on teams where a competitor could add features faster than us and eventually they pulled ahead and took customers. I’ve been on the other team too. Early lead matters if you planning a quick sale and to run with the money. But if you miss then someone will eat your lunch. If you learn to write less brittle code you can recover.