"It works" is where the conversation starts, not where it ends. Plenty of code works and is still wrong — wrong in the way a sentence can be grammatically correct and say nothing.

The tax

Taste costs time. Deleting a function that runs fine because there's a clearer shape underneath it is, on paper, a waste. No ticket asked for it. No user will notice. You pay the tax anyway, because the alternative is a codebase that slowly stops making sense, one reasonable compromise at a time.

What you're buying

You're buying legibility — the ability of the next person to read the code and understand the intent, not just the behaviour. That's the thing that decays silently and is nearly impossible to retrofit. You either defend it continuously or you lose it.

The honest caveat

Taste without shipping is just procrastination in a nicer outfit. The skill isn't having standards; it's knowing which thirty minutes of polish change the next year, and which are vanity. I get that wrong often enough to stay humble about it.