I love lichess so much - this blog summarizes a sentiment that I've struggled to explain to clients/colleagues over the years. Just quote after quote for me to drop on people.

Adding lines of code to a program is like adding weight to a plane. It better be worth it.

Adding a new feature is quick and fun. Maintaining it over the years is the real work.

Lines of code are not valuable. They are a cost, that is not paid while writing them, but while maintaining them. Sometimes years later. And they pile up.

https://lichess.org/@/thibault/blog/we-dont-want-all-the-features/q3nOzv4n

I like the "weight to a plane" analogy! I'll be using that from now on.

Oooh, that's another good one. So far I've dropped the weight to a plane a couple times today - everyone seems to like it. In my career, I've had to maintain a lot of code written by others - or have had the opportunity to re-write large swathes of it. The look on people's faces when I'm like "We have the exact same feature set, but we have 8x less code" is really telling. The developers/maintainers are blown away, while those who are a few steps removed from the code are like "oh, that's neat - you seem happy"....