I agree with having empathy for future devs, but I think it only goes so far. I've often seen junior engineers unable to differentiate between code they don't understand and bad code.

Usually they end up thinking they can do a better job, decide to rewrite the thing from scratch, and take 10x longer to rewrite it than they thought it would take. And accomplish nothing in the end, because the thing they rewrote worked in the first place.