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Unfortunately it seems like businesses only wake up and asks for cost reduction on the infrastructure spend side once the problem is out of control. At that point, the level of operations effort to get it under control feels more like a "big rewrite" than a collection of small tweaks.

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It's opportunity cost. If it's not a problem then you can just make more money with your time.

That's why in our company we have 2 type of engineering effort, core projects impact and improvement. Not all time is spent on the impact. A balancing act is needed

Nah, that'd imply they think about this objectively. Most companies simply don't.

Most time this "opportunity cost" is then spent on useless hacky features that are never used and forgotten right after release (redesign anyone?).

Of course there are exceptions to all of these, but IME the majority of companies are either focusing on pennies or ignoring it completely. Not sure why you don't see balanced approaches more often. Maybe this will change with less VC money flying around.

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