Exactly this. When I reject a refactor PR (or ideally, _before_ there's a PR), it's not because it's a bad idea, per se.

But there's risk associated with every change, and it takes time to review, QA, monitor the rollout, communicate to stake holders, etc.

The refactor itself may be the smallest part of it.

That's one dimension of it, but in the context of this thread we are talking about how maintainable a codebase is for other humans. If your codebase is messy you depend on a few key employees and it might be hard to onboard new ones, so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt.