> In my experience maintenance does not suffer long term with codebase size, if anything it became easier with model advances.

This reminds me of Moore's law in the 1990s.

If you program ran slowly, or used too much RAM, you could spend six months optimising it (or removing features). Or you could just sit on it for six months and release it as it is - hardware moved on so fast that, by then, it probably ran successfully.

Your suggestion is a bit like this: don't worry, the pace of model understanding will catch up faster than the code will get disorganised.

I'm not saying I agree but it's an interesting idea.