This is one thing that has made the transition to a larger company so hard for me. In smaller team, you can spend a bit of time cleaning up the codebase or tooling and know that investment will compound via increased velocity.
This is the actual emotional reason why I am now such a big fan of microservices (or rather, moderately-sized services): I want my own garden to tend alongside a moderately-sized team.
When you share a codebase with 200 others, trying to get anything tidy and readable is such a yak-shaving exercise, you feel like the main character from https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
This is the actual emotional reason why I am now such a big fan of microservices (or rather, moderately-sized services): I want my own garden to tend alongside a moderately-sized team.