I can see how many would object to what you’re suggesting.

However, I’ve also had managers who pushed back against nice-to-have cleanups as the product matured (especially close to a release). They had cause as the product became overly complex, where issues were tedious to root cause and fix.

I tended to queue up a lot of improvements and then unleash them at the beginning of a release cycle.

Later QA would find a problem in the previous release but couldn’t reproduce in the later one… because I had already fixed it.

I didn’t introduce bugs intentionally, and the fixes were visible as we had to backport them for point releases, etc.