How this goes is the engineers start raising arguments in meetings full of nerdy technical terms such as “refactor”, “technical debt” and “accidental complexity”. As time progresses, more of them say more of this. At some point management learns that when engineers say engineery words like this you sometimes gotta say yes and let them do it even if it means urgent features are delayed, or the engineers will walk.

It's a two ways street though, isn't it? With lazy/unskilled/unmotivated developers you will have a shitty product, or maybe your SaaS would explode the day it's starting to get traction.