It can certainly be true for several reasons. Even in domains I'm familiar with, often making a change is costly in terms of coding effort.

For example just recently I updated a component in one of our modules. The work was fairly rote (in this project we are not allowed to use LLMs). While it was absolutely necessary to do the update here, it was beneficial to do it everywhere else. I didn't do it in other places because I couldn't justify spending the effort.

There are two sides to this - with LLMs, housekeeping becomes easy and effortless, but you often err on the side of verbosity because it costs nothing to write.

But much less thought goes into every line of code, and I often am kinda amazed that how compact and rudimentary the (hand-written) logic is behind some of our stuff that I thought would be some sort of magnum opus.

When in fact the opposite should be the case - every piece of functionality you don't need right now, will be trivial to generate in the future, so the principle of YAGNI applies even more.