That may be your experience, but I assure you that there are plenty of companies where it's not like that. Where I work, our product team is pretty receptive to us taking time to fix tech debt, since:

- Engineering is very transparent about explaining when tech debt is slowing down development of new features

- We recognize that buggy/unreliable software hurts customer retention

- Engineering leadership has set the expectation that a significant portion of each team's time should be spent on maintenance and reliability.