[The_Colonel]

Those are easy calls for which everyone's incentives are aligned.

The problems come from the calls where personal incentives are not aligned. A typical example - the team builds a feature hidden by a feature toggle which is, after a period of A/B testing, enabled globally on the product.

The existence of the feature toggle raises the complexity of the code - let's say it's used in 10 different places, each of those double the amount of possible code paths. Removing it may be a question of a couple of hours of work and is very clearly work paying for itself in the long term, but PM will not schedule this work, because there's no immediate upside for them personally and the cost of keeping the toggle in code is a long term one, spread over the whole organization.

In other words, PM is more likely to get a bonus by slashing work on such tech debt items (and thus them personally delivering the features faster) rather than punished for keeping the toggles/complexity behind.