I'm agreeing with you. It has to do with code not being visible to management. That is intentional, management doesn't want to see or think about code. They want to push that entire concern to the technical team and never see it. Which is reasonable enough. Then they have a time demand or feature demands (which amount to the same thing) and suddenly the technical team doesn't see a lot of breathing space to work on code quality. If management trusts a credible view expressed by the technical team or the technical team can irrefutably prove that the added time will improve some metric of business interest then this can change.