Also not so coincidentally the 'fun' to fix debt is often prioritized over critical debt. Case in point, the situation with our flaky/unstable test got so bad

Also not so coincidentally the 'fun' to fix debt is often prioritized over critical debt. Case in point, the situation with our flaky/unstable test got so bad that quarter of them are now to set ignore any failures. Pretty much zero interest in fixing. Meanwhile, the rewrite of a service that had no outstanding bugs (but was originally written by other team but handed to us) is still not done after 4 months...