> No, I meant the scenario where a company listens to the engineers and lets them put off business goals to spend weeks to months every so often refactoring, ending up with a modern, easily-maintained system instead of an arcane mess.

I've seen it happen, once. Almost two years of work, lots of architecture, design and all that. Built a beautiful codebase that implemented a product that noone actually wanted. It was a positive experience in some ways, but not something I want to see again.