Comment by Atreiden

This is the job of tech leadership IMO. People respond to incentive changes. If these items are properly prioritized on the roadmap, and credit and recognition follows tech debt remediation efforts to a similar degree as feature delivery, the work can be done.

But this requires strong tech leadership who can interface well with the C Suite and get buy-in for delaying in feature delivery. In the absence of this buy-in, you pretty much need to control the narrative and create a rogue skunkworks initiative to wrap these improvements _into_ the feature delivery.

Many companies don't have strong tech leadership though, and will perpetually churn VPs and Directors, forever chasing A Change without addressing the culture and incentive system that created that culture.