No one actually lives up to their principles, but it's still important that we have them.

If you actually do live up to yours, then you need to adopt better principles.

Any principle in itself isn't without critique, agree, but it's still the choice being made to pick this specific principle that tells the whole story. There are so many principles to pick from and the tech dept pick follows up with a "We have a 3-month “no refactoring” rule for new hires. This isn’t everyone’s preferred work style! We try to be up front about stuff.", which sounds a bit like an additional perform or else... principle that just delays ownership of the stuff you're supposed to work with. In the best case that sounds like naiive optimism and in the worst case that's gross negligence... neither one speaks "engineering" to me.