That “just changing a word” is easy and quick. A codebase is an iceberg. Management only really typically understands the surface, but there is a disproportionate amount of ice under the water.

I had to change all instances of a label from a word to an abbreviation. Because we don’t have i18n set up in the app, it ended up affecting 55 different files. I did my best to consolidate into everything calling a common function, but it’s far from perfect. 55 files changed because management said “oh this word here should be shorter”.