OK, but that's not the question I asked. What I want to know is how we can make refactoring as much a non-negotiable part of the process as code review, tests, CI/CD, or whatever you consider essential, non-skippable, even under a short timeframe?
In the context they were in, the answer to all of those questions is "shut the fuck up, we can talk about it later".
In the normal course of business, it's a different conversation. Even then, if you're making some poor dev refactor a bunch of code because they had the misfortune to touch it, maybe you should have done the work yourself a long time ago. Or written a linter and ticketed owners.
You don't want to make feature development some sort of pain lottery.
Unplanned work being arbitrarily scoped into sprint is pain. Doesn't matter the source.
In practice, your approach often turns into "junior engineer abuse" where they have to clean up a bunch of unrelated pre-existing stuff to make the seniors happy as a condition of shipping their feature.
