As long as it doesn't affect the health of the codebase or force the engineers to work overtime, why do the engineers care about what features get shipped or no

As long as it doesn't affect the health of the codebase or force the engineers to work overtime, why do the engineers care about what features get shipped or not? They're paid to code, so if they aren't sacrificing code quality or working overtime they should just focus on coding features that may or may not get shipped. I mean, if we're being strictly objective that is. If the engineers have feelings they might feel dismissed and devalued if they spend time and effort making features nobody will ever see.