>As long as engineers are paid based on salary/wages this will always be the case, and has been the case in every company I've worked with.

I don't think this is 100% true, and the problem you are describing doesn't necessarily follow the cause you put forth.

Problem: Engineers do not work through tasks quickly because they aren't rewarded for completing tasks.

Solution (hypothetical): Reward engineers for completing certain tasks.

Problem: How do you value how much a task or feature is worth?

Solution (hypothetical): A task's value is correlated with the impact on the business's bottom line.

Anyone who's worked at a large SV tech firm can see the problem coming - engineers will only want to work on valuable, front facing tasks, and maintenance and technical debt tasks never get cleaned up. For example, Google[1], ties their promotion system to the value of the tasks you have done at Google - which obviously leads to a lot of gaming the system to increase your worth. So while I agree there might be a motivation problem, I don't think it's clear cut that the compensation model is the solution.

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/