I have no idea if that's true anymore in this situation. The benefit of good design and code is that it's flexible where it needs to be to make changes easy and hopefully avoids many changes overall.
If changes become cheap, the same benefits don't apply anymore. Large scale refractors can become background tasks. "Turn this project into ECS style" is one session away. The things we valued in long timescales happened because changes and backtracking were painful and a huge time sink.
