Hey Beau, thanks for the note.

Sprint planning could get into feature versus technical debt discussion as you rightly highlight. To ensure technical debt can fit into the roadmap an ideal way would be to allocate like 5-10% of time in every or alternate sprints.

Yes, this clean up activity needs to be planned into sprints since it modifies code and we need to ensure that the clean up does not introduce any side effects.

Regarding the links to learn the basics of APIs from a UX information flow stand point, will check and let you know.