This approach tends to work well. If they don't want to worry about it, they've effectively delegated it to you. The only problem is that this setup is subject

This approach tends to work well. If they don't want to worry about it, they've effectively delegated it to you. The only problem is that this setup is subject to the tragedy of the commons. If it takes 25% more work to make a change cleanly, the developers throwing hacks around look 20% more productive if we ignore technical debt. And, worse, they're often the only people in the world that understand the hacks, so they get to be the hero-experts that come in and save the day when everyone else is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. So even if we'll do our best to bake the cost of cleanup into our day-to-day tasks, that only works as long as a critical mass of the developers in the organization do the same thing. Otherwise, you'll have a full time job plus some just cleaning up messes.