Or they won't discover, because they'll be 5 years gone onto the next company, and the product will slowly decay under the cost of upkeep of its technical debt

Or they won't discover, because they'll be 5 years gone onto the next company, and the product will slowly decay under the cost of upkeep of its technical debt and the business fail. The free market is not, in fact, perfectly frictionless. Executive decisions still matter and can make the difference between having, say, a photo sharing site that people like to use, and having one that's shut down because they can't pay to fix the legacy code.