That's one of the reasons I'm pretty happy to work in a place where my manager will generally agree if I tell them that I'm planning to spend the next 3 months

That's one of the reasons I'm pretty happy to work in a place where my manager will generally agree if I tell them that I'm planning to spend the next 3 months improving the test suite or harness or adding one layer of safety to eliminate a class of bugs or adding a new static analysis. Of course, this is also a place where we practice static analysis, continuous integration, code reviews and we're now progressively migrating code to Rust.