Sometimes to make a project work you need all types of work, not only high visibility, high impact work that gets management attention and raises.

Good example is promo process at a particular large tech company - you win promo by picking a project that is high visiblity, appears difficult, standalone piece with "ownership". Maybe 25% of work that needs to be done meets this criteria.

It's hard to get promoted for "product excellence". They tried to do a push a few years ago, when I was there. You won't get promoted for fixing an issue that annoys millions of users or maintaining a succesfull product, unless you really build a case around that with data, case studies, etc. You would spend more than half of your effort on proving that your work is valuable.