Upon reading that, my idea is that that person had too high a workload to do it all the “right” way, was learning on the job, or both. They might realize it all could be more clean and proper, but not have the ability to make that investment in fixing their technical debt.
On my own code, every time I have gone in and thought I was going to fix it by refactoring or rewrites, I slowly and sometimes tragically re-learn all of the edge cases I was writing around and frustrating things I discovered when I was writing it in the first place. There may be non-obvious problems regarding other peoples’ APIs, for instance, that necessitate methods which appear to be poor practice from the outside.
On my own code, every time I have gone in and thought I was going to fix it by refactoring or rewrites, I slowly and sometimes tragically re-learn all of the edge cases I was writing around and frustrating things I discovered when I was writing it in the first place. There may be non-obvious problems regarding other peoples’ APIs, for instance, that necessitate methods which appear to be poor practice from the outside.