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.
Good engineers would communicate effectively of something is impacting the product. Good product understands how to judge that impact and prioritize it. Frankly, if the engineers are making enough tech debt that they don't want to play in their own sandbox as part of regular practice, maybe they should walk.
Let them walk. Good programmers can write code that doesn't degrade the customer experience.
In the last 15 years it's been all about the programmer's experience and user-facing software is objectively slower, buggier, and more resource intensive.