We had a couple of projects that had unit tests neglected so we enforced that you had to round up to the next closest 1% on the package.json for your merge to be approved (as well as adding some unit tests)
In 3-4 weeks, code coverage slowly went from 20% to 73%.
I believe that one of the cognitive dissonances with people who think a lot of code is good news is that they become overwhelmed by how much they would actually write if they stuck to their convictions and so they start using TODOs to make themselves feel better about doing the wrong thing.
Projects that grow slower I suspect have fewer TODOs.