It depends, if you work in a statically typed language you can just use a tool to refactor. I bet a ton of advice is from JavaScript programmers where it’s simply not safe to do this.
My first job doing JavaScript I realized the IDE’s refactor tool wasn’t aware that two variables of the same name were in fact a different variable. Due to how scoping works, it’s hard to write a reliable tool to rename variables for JS. I accidentally introduced a bug renaming a variable.
It depends, if you work in a statically typed language you can just use a tool to refactor. I bet a ton of advice is from JavaScript programmers where it’s simply not safe to do this.
My first job doing JavaScript I realized the IDE’s refactor tool wasn’t aware that two variables of the same name were in fact a different variable. Due to how scoping works, it’s hard to write a reliable tool to rename variables for JS. I accidentally introduced a bug renaming a variable.