If they aren't leading to more profits then you're tilting at windmills here.

Oh, they will lead to more profits. Some bad human-made architecture decisions were tying us down trying to keep our product stable instead of being able to focus on what would drive new customer growth.

I've seen outages caused by bad architecture.

Since AI has gotten good, I've also done some of the rewrites to fix the past lack of budget/planning, hubris or sometimes devs who didn't know any better.

This is why what we as software developers would describe as quality or reliability improvements are so difficult to sell to people making the decisions about what to spend our time with.

And worse, they're right - developing a feature can increase baseline profits more and faster than rewriting some old code can. The effects of software quality and the like are long-term.

But I can almost guarantee that all the unicorn companies we've seen in the past decades, the now trillion dollar companies, didn't become that because of code quality or diligence.

I would guess, uncharitably, you would surmise your downvoters are just navel-gazing engineers who, given their druthers, would endlessly polish some irrelevant bauble rather than ship something genuinely useful to customers. But good products can only extend so far from their foundations.

The core Dropbox idea was clearly good. But in order for it to really be a multi-billion dollar business it needed a platform that would support lots of users. Postgres: a pretty good idea. But it needs an underlying OS that provides things like processes and storage. iPhone: cool idea, made possible entirely by hard won engineering gains in processing efficiency, battery tech, touchscreen tech, cellular network buildout, etc etc.

Not literally everything can be product/profit thinking. There is a lot of engineering work underlying great products that yielded tremendous profits.

If it's actually fixing performance metrics in a way the user can feel or that hit the bottom line it's worthwhile. I'm a lot more suspicious when it is said that the user wouldn't notice them, though.