Most of them are content to simply pile on new functionality, without any concept of polish, refinement, or how allocating time for technical work can speed up the delivery of that functionality.
understanding importance of code quality/testing
&& willingness to allocate dedicated time to achieve code quality
&& having ability/position/power to withstand management's pressure on just deliveries
I've seen "senior" developers that are very happy to skip writing tests (or write useless tests that basically just return true) even though their management was happy to allocate the time to do decent testing.
The whole leadership chain from CEO down needs to make sure everyone understands and works towards the company's goals. If someone isn't that's just the normal course of productivity issue resolved in the normal way. Sometimes it's because someone isn't as good and engineer as you thought and is resistant to training, sometimes it's as you say they're unfocused on the mission, either way having a layer of people whose entire job is juggling these folks feels like putting fingers in holes in the dam.
That's who I mean by managers, btw. Just because someone has "manager" in their title doesn't mean they're this thing. Plenty of critical product managers I've worked with.
If people aren't doing their jobs they should be fired - not have someone babysit them and the whole team so everyone just suffers.
All that ends up happening is introduce things like broken scrum and push to show cards getting down rather than real value.
Congrats. You've gone from 1 extreme to the other. No difference.
It sounds like your hiring pipeline is broken if that's the behavior you observe. That's not how real Software Engineers work.
My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun, stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now. Then they present their super awesome new software architecture that they spent a month working on that doesn't solve any problems except implement the devs vision of a framework for inverse dependency injection or whatever they read a blog about last week.