Are you addressing my statement or someone else's? I don't understand how going through with code reviews for any change is somehow distracting from "code under review."
And surely addressing the code you're touching isn't "extraneous" cleanup. You're modifying the code, you can do it bit by bit.
I think he's addressing this line from the original article, which sparked this whole sub-thread way up-thread:
"Also, there are 2 old Debug commands, an unassigned variable warning message, and a hard-coded Employee ID that will all have to be fixed before this module can be moved to production."
Basically, it's the idea that if you touch a piece of code, you have to fix everything else wrong with it, even if that involves touching other areas of the code that you weren't looking at initially and may not even have familiarity with.
This is "the perfect is the enemy of the good", applied to code refactoring. If your policies put people on the hook for fixing mistakes that were made by other people a long time ago every time they touch code, there is a very strong incentive to never touch code. You get a bunch of hyperactive software wizards that shit out a working product (with a bunch of crap code), put it on their resume, and then move on to another employer. The people hired after them have a strong incentive to never do anything (because touching code will require that they touch a bunch of other stuff that they don't understand and have no interest in dealing with), and so they browse Reddit and Hacker News all day long. The code remains crappy, but its crappiness can't be blamed on anyone except folks who are no longer with the company.
Actually, this is a pretty accurate description of the software industry.
And surely addressing the code you're touching isn't "extraneous" cleanup. You're modifying the code, you can do it bit by bit.