"No, it's less effort than that"

I get the point, and with irresponsible parties (as is fairly widespread in most companies) there's a real risk here.

However the analogy of a meteorologist seems poor as that job is focused on predicting the weather - the typical dev is focused on operating in that weather and comparatively inexperienced in predicting with great accuracy.

What's frustrating as a stakeholder is ludicrous estimates, which don't even start with the work time, let alone end up with a realistic duration. This is particularly true (and frustrating) at the micro task level, an area I'm often requiring items that take at most 30 minute to complete and are usually things I could do in less time if only I had access... You get a weeks long estimate back, even when it's incurring a serious cost in production and falls in the drop everything category (which obviously one wants to avoid but does come up). I get that none of those 30 minute tasks will take 30 minute alone as there's testing and documentation to add but the more bs level the estimate, the more it damages the trust relationship.

Don't ask for 30 minutes tasks unless you have to (it's breaking the prod or something), it's inefficient for everyone involved.

I'm in a team with a lot of leeway. No one is counting my hours, no one external look at our productivity, but when we're needed, we don't have time to polish our code. When i have a '30 minute' task identified, I put it in our morning review, and ask if something adjacent should be done while I'm on the subject. If there is nothing, I'll still take the full day (except if it's a project I know really well, in that case I take half), and take half a day to skim the code, and another half to update it (small comment, version upgrade, code improvement, renaming variables).

Push your IC to do the same. Imo it's more time efficient, the new-ish IC use that time to learn the older code, and in the end you will have less legacy issues (unless you make a big change).

Understood. I never do unless it were breaking prod or breaking major business processes.

Regular approaches, avoiding firefighting are essential to steady, stable states.