That seems like very myopic management since a) motivated employees will work harder b) technical debt has a continual productivity hit even in the short term.

That seems like very myopic management since a) motivated employees will work harder b) technical debt has a continual productivity hit even in the short term. If spending 20 hours on terraform saves the team 100 hours of debugging over the next 6 months then that may be a net win. Keep in mind that due to context switching and flow even a 10 minute "fix it now" bug will use up 2-4 hours worth of productivity.