[pragmatic]

Your assuming that scrum/agile/management won't take this over?

What stakeholder is prioritizing any of those things and paying for it out of their budget?

Code improvement projects are the White Whale of software engineering - obsessed over but rarely from a business point of view worth it.

[skybrian]

The costs for code improvement projects have gone down dramatically now that we have power tools. So, perhaps it will be considered more worthwhile now? But how this actually plays out for professional programming is going to depend on company culture and management.

In my case, I'm an early-retired hobbyist programmer, so I control the budget. The same is true for any open source project.