As a technique against this, at the point that you're writing the code to begin with, have you ever tried documenting the reasons you're doing something even if it's blatantly obvious at the time?
// rather than use the API we parse a scrape here with a
// regex because we signed up and it doesn't have half the fields we want.
like, totally obvious. except six years later when the regex stops matching, and you are already using the API all over the code anyway and you get to this part with the scrape and you don't get it. Are we trying to elude the API requests number limit? or what is the reason for this bizarre scrape.
a lot of people would refactor by seeing if they can put the API call in there, but this wastes massive time you could avoid if you knew the reason for this in the first place. and maybe the API still doesn't have it, and so you put the API call in, you try to remember the reason for the scrape, and then you realize that all this is still the best way to do this, you just have to update the regex to continue to match. work that could have been saved by a simple comment telling you the reason it looks this way.
a lot of people would refactor by seeing if they can put the API call in there, but this wastes massive time you could avoid if you knew the reason for this in the first place. and maybe the API still doesn't have it, and so you put the API call in, you try to remember the reason for the scrape, and then you realize that all this is still the best way to do this, you just have to update the regex to continue to match. work that could have been saved by a simple comment telling you the reason it looks this way.