That's a hobbyist's rule. In industry, every PR should strive to deliver maximum value to the company, which is sometimes achieved by doing as little as possible so you can work down other objectives.

thats a largely meaningless response. enforcing a decent and maintainable architecture is potentially of great value to the company. Unfortunately thats a subjective call. I'm sure you've lived through codebases that dont really admit bug fixes or feature enhancements - things that the company knows that it cares about.

as professionals who are invested in the long term success of the company, it our responsibility to bring up concerns about the future, and attempt to negotiate a good compromise between the short term and long terms goals.

leaving the codebase cleaner than you found it IS creating maximum value to the company because large changes are almost never walking on the knife's edge between "making the codebase better" and "making the codebase worse". Your codebase either gets better over time, or it gets worse. If it's getting 0.01% worse with every PR, that tech debt accumulates at 1.0001*(# of PRs) which grows faster than you'd think.

Having a maintainable codebase is of MASSIVE LONG-TERM value to a company - far too many orgs are paralyzed by mountains of tech debt.

Doing the minimal work possible is fine for 1-off hotfixes or tweaks or small features, but your argument assumes "maximum value to the company" is measured in the span of of a sprint, and it's not.

Cleaning up the codebase incrementally does deliver value to the company as long as you understand "cleaning up" as "making it easier and faster to contribute to, change, or debug in the future" rather than something adjacent to a form of performance art.