When on a tough slope, a beginner skier has to be extra careful to ensure that at no time is his speed out of control. As he does that, he pays a price in energy. If every turn he makes results in a complete stop, his legs have to do the extra work. A good skiier is both faster AND uses less energy, as the turns he makes don't lose as much momentum.
Refactoring can also be done slowly & carefully, and the price you pay for safety is speed. Refactoring in smaller steps is safer, but in order to ensure safety, you have to put up all sorts of scaffolding to make the intermediate steps work.
This scaffolding (intermediate datastructures and functions) is what's needed to make the new code and the old code work together, and will later need to be discarded as old code is eliminated.
An expert refactorer would be able to skip the intermediate steps and make the final version quicker. But working that way is of course dangerous business, and could cause more crashes along the way (pun intended).
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