Anyone else work in a codebase that is so deeply convoluted, that the only way to make new features work is to write new code in a similarly convoluted way?

Everyone wants to refactor our system, but we're a small shop with an insane amount of technical debt, so it likely won't happen for a long time. Any suggestions in the meantime? I feel like I'm spending more time figuring out how to make something work in our system then learning actual good practices.

I have a co-worker who negative-indents his function bodies. Minus four spaces. Every function. Not an IDE thing either, he does it intentionally.

I've never seen anything like it.