Speaking for my own experience, program-level and above management often doesn't put their money where their mouth is. Maintenance is chronically under-funded, well-articulated and respectful feedback is ignored with a thank-you. Hell more than once I've been forced to spend an entire day in a conference room with all the other relevant devs to do a "Root Cause Analysis" of a given recent crisis, and we took it seriously each time and came up with genuine solutions. But said solutions required more hardware, more maintenance, more stuff that no one wanted to budget for.
You work in that environment long enough, you learn to clock in and clock out. If you allow yourself to give a shit you'll just be constantly tearing your hair out. Those of us with some objective sense of professionalism usually evolve into the functional elites you mention, but I completely understand those who go the other way.