I think this is great. Reminds me of Y2K. I remember sometime around 1993 having a discussion with my boss why we store dates on our mainframe as YYMMDD instead of YYYYMMDD since we are approaching year 2000. He ignored the issue totally. I left the company but people told me later that in 1999 they suddenly started a huge effort to change the date format. Same with all the technical debt. It got ignored for a long time but finally we are forced to address it.
There is a saying: no decision before its time. Management is making the decision to defer action until it is no longer a decision but a necessity. It's dumb MBA thinking, but I can probably guess the company you worked for is still around after Y2K and that they made a boat-load of money selling the new features instead of not selling new features and fixing the problem.