I had a Philippino friend who told me of his early experience in a Japanese development outfit - the team got praised by management (maybe not CEO) on performance improvements and code reduction. At the time I thought those priorities would never have flown in the US (though was of like thinking).
So this mindset does/did exist.
If are building something that will be sold, particularly in a competitive market, management will almost always believe that new features trump reducing technical debt. To a product manager, even four weeks of technical debt reduction sounds like "no new features for a month."
Yeah, but if you can't implement new features in under a month because the code is such a mess, then maybe spending a month cleaning it up will allow you to do more features in a shorter amount of time, thus increasing revenue faster than just hacking more features into the existing crappy codebase. Obviously it depends on the codebase, but you have to look at both long and short term goals to make good decisions.