I believe "TODO" comments are valuable and should be left in; it shows the author also understands there's a better way, once it's viable. Most of my professional colleagues do not agree. I swear it's an ego thing.
I believe this is due to how IDEs have introduced useful features to elevate things like specific comment structures like TODO into something "official" and recognized and reported on.
So things like a quick "let's improve this part later, but this is fine for now" become items that are highlighted as not "DONE" and then are seen as eyesores or unprioritized tickets, which leaves a bad feeling for devs.
While I think these features of automatically tracking TODOs can have their uses, like most things if they become metrics they start to lose their value. Sometimes it's better to just have a keyword you can easily grep for when you do find some time, having these results show up as cases against your abilities to finish the work is unhelpful, but that's what the manager and maybe coworkers see, unfortunately.
Hum... Your comment reads like "I have this very specific and subjective process that works for me; people that do things differently are too egocentric to notice their incompetence". Your colleagues may react badly to that style.
I believe (but I'm not sure) I do get what you re trying to say, but not every TODO reflects some eternal trade-off. Some are for real clear improvements (like the "there isn't any code here" into "the code was written" on my example) whose history won't add any value after they got done.
