A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.
Isn’t it for the team to find out and decide whether they reached “gold plating” yet? That statement doesn’t sound like a rejection or reason for rejection to me.