> allowing people to do anything in the name of 'technical debt' 'code quality', resulting in more bugs, lots of needless refactoring, tons of layers of abstraction and tests that actually do close to nothing.

This heavily points to dysfunctional development team with fault being primary on tech leads making more and more mess the more they code.

> companies need to make money to allow for proper code to be developed, second is also valuable as long as it makes sense financially as well.

This one is merely about putting less resources on development. I don't think it fixes the dysfunctional team above, it is just avoid the issues. There is nothing that would make developers write useful tests. Nothing that would change tech leads, nothing that would prevent unmaintainable code appearing again.

Had the constantly refactoring team ended with very good code for too much of price, then cutting resources is likely to lead to better trade off. But that is not their case, their case is that they don't know how to write good code.