They often fall in the middle of everything, and there is no set team to handle them (“everyone’s responsible”). Then as they’re critical, someone can’t just take half an hour to do a quick fix, it must be reviewed (and no one actively wants to review it, as it’s not trivial and not their job —- cf “everyone’s responsible —-). Plus anyone succesfully fixing them will be flagged as a potential maintainer when everyone else is running away.

Internal tooling in software companies is a beast in its own.