Yes, I often feel like 'refactorability' is way undervalued. The focus is on writing abstractions that can be easily extended to handle more cases but as soon as some case doesn't fit, it will be hacked in because the code is abstracted in a very narrow way and cannot be easily refactored to accommodate this new case 'natively'.

Do that for a couple of years in a single codebase and the beautiful abstraction design has changed into a state machine with a transition between almost every pair of states

Yep, modularity is immensely valuable. Requirements change. Technology changes.