"No, it's less effort than that"

I think the biggest challenge I have is that people will immediately ask for estimates when the project is barely a paragraph description. On top of that, my feeling is always "it depends on how much tech debt is in the code after I look in there."

The only reasonable response I've had is "I need 1-2 days to both push you on solidifying these requirements, and stop & audit the codebase to look for any risks before starting".

Is there anything I could be doing better here?

This is the problem I have at the moment as well:

Company Leadership asks for estimate with barely any information, I will then say that I need to learn more about the project and look into the codebase, leadership then says that they "just" need to have an estimate to approve this work and if they want to do this project at all. Around and around it goes until I give them a large estimate (which is large because of all the unknowns including the unknown scope) which is then too much and too expensive for leadership.