"My app has a memory leak. Please can I have the engineering time to debug an operating system." wouldn't fly at any company. It's not that developers don't care; it's that developers don't have any choice.
Depends on the domain.
For example we had our devices for impaired vision people stop responding to touch events on our cheap OEM touchscreens when German locale was enabled. Turns out linux driver used locale-specific code to read calibration configuration so each event position was scaled by orders of magnitude :)
The funny thing is that then they fixed that in the driver and if you had commas in the config file as a workaround - you get a kernel panic :)
User experience is one of those things that doesn't matter until it suddently does, often when a competitor sells a product that doesn't reboot in the middle of a user operation.
the details are here: https://github.com/jiixyj/libinput/commit/98793f6b435abf8c17...
The funny thing is we had the issue once - reported it and added a workaround (added special handling for these config files that used locale-specific calibration tables), then a year later we updated the linux version and had the issue the opposite way till we removed our workaround :) But it was even more fun cause it bricked the devices (kernel panic on libinput startup = restart loop forever) :)
I would honestly say that all developers outside of companies who activity are going to run out of cash in 6 months have the time and are given the choice.
When management says, we don't have the time the reality is the proposed time given goes beyond a reasonable allocation of time, the max capacity given and or managers bullshit radar amount.
Great developers also are able to factor these tasks into their own ticket time to make the time for the issue.
I've been in countless meetings where individuals will complain about the state of X, how this is a hack, or we should really fix that.
Plenty of times I've seen, "You've got two days of dedicated time to identify, solve and implement."
This is met with various results, individuals taking the time, don't really do any work and consider it free time.
They spend two days just trying to understand even how all the components fit together. Even if you revisit in a month with another two days they'll spend the same two days relearning the same information because they did not retain or make notes to be able to pickup where they left off.
On a rare occasion someone will come in and fix it or move the needle further for the next person. All of these issues tend to funnel into these types of developers and from my sampling they're ~1 per 100 developers at a company.
If all companies would don't care, open source wouldn't be there where it is.
Leaving a leak in your code base is a risk too. What if it scales with something outside of your control and suddenly you have to restart every 15 seconds?
Its literally the answer to every devOps problem.
(This is a joke btw.)
(... or is it?)
Sometimes quality matters more than money
The rule of thumb is that the vast, overwhelming majority of developers are working on business apps, especially Line Of Business (LOB) internal apps nobody ever sees.
It's hard to get exact numbers for this stuff but I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of base infrastructure developers (kernel, shell, drivers, compilers, runtimes, frameworks, libraries etc.) to app developers is 1:100.
I'm not sure I see your point in this context.
Especially if you're running open source. Yes there are sponsored open source developers, but do the people who don't care even submit a bug report more than half the time?