> I always try to shy away from making things look nicer
That's understandable, though from my experience, lots of old bugs can be found while refactoring code, even at the (small) risk of introducing new bugs.
FWIW, I tend to err on the side of "do it", and I usually do it. But I have been in a situation where a customer asked for the risk level, I answered to the best of my knowledge (quite low but it's hard to be 100% sure), and they declined the change. The consequences of a bug would have been pretty horrible, too. Hundreds of thousands of (things) shipped with buggy software that is somewhat cumbersome to update.
Also, try to avoid small commits / changes; churn in code should be avoided, especially in kernel code. IIRC the Linux project and a lot of open source projects do not accept 'refactoring' pull requests, among other things for this exact reason.
Not sure what you mean by that