My point is that even “something meaningful” comes with tech debt. It’s like that at my current place.

Too many people get “grass is greener” syndrome and think that there is some magical company somewhere which gives everyone plenty of time to refactor everything and fix all of the tech debt and execs make fantastic business risk decisions which always benefit the employee. In a world of scarcity, that practically never happens.

Just weigh your options in the market. If it’s worth staying where you are, just realize that the employee is not responsible for making business risk decisions, only responsible for sufficiently informing those who do of the facts.

Unfortunately we're at stage they will outright ignore what they're told, and then blame engineers for not being able to do what they said they couldn't do from the start. They refuse to acknowledge their impact on creating the tech debt in the first place by poor planning and wishful but impractical timelines, so proving to them we need to tackle any part of it is a struggle without letting things degrade to the point a real customer with significant money on the line is upset enough by the state of things to tackle it.

Which ultimately means we're at the horribly dysfunctional stage of management/company growth, the question is does it continue to get worse or does the CEO eventually learn and seriously look at the effectiveness of the VP levels and make changes...