If you own a piece of land, you're rich. A high paywall, deters large investment from low-cap income group and thus reducing ownership. If you never own, you'll keep on paying the rich. I believe that's the setup.
I would rather choose to live healthy than living longer. However, fact is, most of physical health deterioration starts from mental agony. Mental health is directly correlated to physical health. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9840511/)
I start with questions like -
- What are the engineering and business benefits of refactoring the current code base?
- What is the cost of not refactoring code base? Does it affect user experience, performance of the app?
- Does it significantly improves onboarding time for new engineers?
- Does it enable the team to incorporate future updates or feature development?
etc.
Any engineering tech-debt has to be justified with outcomes, and needs to be weighed against current priorities. Else it will be a waste of critical resource.