while I agree with you, your description of refactoring scares me. It makes me imagine an over-engineered hot mess. I had a conversation with a junior engineer just today about valuing simplicity and avoiding abstractions until you're sure you really need them.

because cleanliness isn't really the goal, the goal is meeting business needs, stability, and discoverability. Often times abstractions create complexity, and that complexity hurts discoverability, it potentially hurts stability, and it can often times be detrimental if business needs change.

So I say abstract when it's clear that you need to, not before.

That's not to say I disagree with the sentiment to get the code working and then go back over it with an eye for cleaning it up, I just dislike the sentiment that this cleanup should be for abstracting things.