Goldbricking and polishing turds are definitely pitfalls, but the benefit of a low debt codebase is insanely fast turnaround. If you want to optimize for that, you need to do some fixes in anticipation of need, and sometimes those will be wrong.
Rewrites should bring a lot of skepticism, and are often worse than turd polishing. If it's gotta happen people should be able to take that on evidence rather than respond because they've developed feelings for the turd.