As long as "cleaner than you found it" also includes "better documented." I've worked with people who think that "the code should speak for itself" to the point that they will make biased decisions with no explanation or documentation and then if you ask them about it after their response is "look at the PR for how that decision was made." I'm not going to git blame and find your PR to find an outcome from an argument between two people that after scrolling just says "sometimes the API returns a JSON string here instead of nested JSON so we have this conditional" when that could be a comment