This got me thinking. I find that being repeatedly told not to clean up a system burns me out. To the extent that our programming is creative and enjoyable in its creativity, one must feel some sort of pride in the result in order to have any interest in its continuation. If you are being told to not clean things up or leave things in a messy state, you are left devoid of this sense of pride and joy in your work.

Best case, you can find pride and joy in something about your programming other than the technical excellence. However, that depends on you personally caring about the purpose of your code's existence.

Of course, left to their own devices, a bunch of engineers could be very happy and ship nothing useful. So you have to impose some sort of balance in a business environment. However, it's an interesting management problem to allow people enough time and autonomy to be proud of their work, while still accomplishing what needs doing. Ideally, with happy engineers, more gets done, and it pays off.