I relate. Technical debt is by far the most common source of frustration in my career. It’s that code someone inexperienced wrote years ago that no one longer understands, but it still needs to be maintained. Often the code is also unnecessarily convoluted, so there’s a high risk of introducing new bugs when working with it.

I’ve recently managed to refactor such code recently. No one could work with it with confidence, it was slow and it was buggy. A lot of the code was also completely unnecessary (like 100 line convoluted mess that could be done with 1 line of code).

Now someone else in my team who has never worked with this code wrote a major addition to it without much assistance, so I take it as a sign that my refactor is a great improvement.