When you realize it was supposed to be a graphic novel, that makes the over-the-top scenes make so much more sense. It's a comic book without the comics.
No. You discuss it with your manager, and you do it at the appropriate time. Having both created, refactored and deleted lots of technical debt over the past 25 years, trust me: you just don't get to go rogue because "you're the engineer". If you do that, it might turn into "you were the engineer".
What if you spend a week or month refactoring something that needs a quick fix now and is being deleted in 1-2 years? That's waste, and if you went rogue, it's your fault. Besides, you always create added QA burden with large refactoring (yes even if you have tests), and you should not do that without a discussion first--even if you're the founder.
Communicate with your manager and (if they agree) VP if needed, and do the right thing at the right time.
Maybe the young men measured have low enough testosterone ranges that the high/low cycles have less effect, but the more likely explanation is that the methodology of this study is pretty laughable...
What this leads to is the joke of guidelines like in Victoria, Canada, where the city basically is trying to mandate that buildings look "interesting", where interesting is defined as "the developer built it out of Jenga blocks that didn't quite line up right" and "used as many different colors as you would get fonts in a school newsletter".
Hey, in Canada the newest model will be! Next year we'll have, what, four F-35s? We'd almost be better off making a bunch of that bronze armour and the cool hats...
This reads like something from The Three Body Problem :)