Greenfield vs Brownfield experience teaches us differently, you don't need analytics involved. Scope creep doesn't just eat up man hours, it eats up the ability to maintain and bring onboard new people. Learning new features to you doesn't eat your time when you already know the product. Learning new features as newguy is far harder because you don't know the underlying product, but you're expected to know the core product, including all new features.
This is tech debt, and all code becomes it, because devs die. Fortunately we end up moving techstacks, which allow the new devs to eliminate that code debt, temporarily.
You see this same thing in gaming. Dota 2, LoL, CS, Live Service XYZ are not getting new players because the amount of things you have to learn now vs when the game was new is mountanic.