A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.
My last job was pretty good about code reviews, when people actually spent time on them. My front end code got much better when the front-end expert actually reviewed it.
My current job, code reviews are a rubber stamp farce and I’ve seen total garbage sail though. The code base is a tire fire. These things are related.