I have also seen refactor, refactor, refactor, oh actually it's now no better than before. Whoops!

It's like imaginary tech debt.

Or even worse than before - and the sad part is that no-one intended that to happen. All bespoke software is effectively an experiment that may fail. I've become a lot more wary of the "failure is good" mantra that SV is famous for - it's not good in a zero-sum game where labor is spent on stuff that gives no value, and refactoring for DX is definitely expensive but only possibly valuable.