> guidance from leadership to fast track fixes.

That is *IF* there ever is acknowledgment that things need to be fixed.

"These pesky issues, who knows where they come from, just quickly get it out of the way. We have the next shiny new to tackle for the next quarter, and we better finish it quickly".

> What happened to the days where software engineers were the experts who decided tech priority?

Outside of a very small number of firms that were called out as notable for being led in a way that enabled that, often by engineers that were themselves still hands on, they never existed, and even there it was “business leadership that happened to also be engineers, and made decisions based on business priorities informed by their understanding of software engineering”, not “software engineers in their walled-off citadels of pure engineering”, and it usually involves, in successful firms, considerable willingness to accept tech debt, just as business leadership can often not be shy about accepting funancial debt.