This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.
If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.
The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes.
...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.