>> a lot of this comes down to budget pressure causing management to constantly discourage efforts by technical teams to invest time in the quality of their systems
Anecdata follows but I’m certain this has been getting better in recent years. It’s more common today for management to be swayed by data - my recollections of the 2000s were interactions more along the lines of
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years son, whatever your little spreadsheet contains, I’ve already accounted for just by feeling the air in the room through my superb gut”. - management at that time had gone from playing with Sinclair spectrums in their bedrooms to leading huge multimillion dollar teams, partly because software development had exploded and someone needed to lead those teams. So several managers I ran across seemed to see their position as a result of their greatness and not really anything at all to do with growth in the industry leading to bigger roles needing filled. This is a long way to say it used to be very hard to penetrate a charismatic self-aggrandising tech leader’s thought bubble.
Today I definitely see it as different. E.g. if you rock up with a download of CI job runtimes and a couple of off the cuff quotes from team members about what they do when waiting for CI builds (I.e. not much of value), I’d expect you to pretty easily succeed in establish a case for investing in speeding up that feedback loop and the outcome / measured results chart of that work would likely make its way through at least a couple of senior management slide decks over the next few weeks.