id guess the time til forst being able to make useful changes has dropped to near zero, but the time to get mastery of the code base has gone towards infinity.

is that mastery still useful as time goes on though? its always felt a bit like its unhealthy for code to have people with mastery on it. its a sign of a bad bus factor. every effort ive ever seen around code quality and documentation improvement has been to make that code mastery and full understanding irrelevant.