How is it dysfunction to keep your devs focused on the tasks you've already identified as the most important?

I can't imagine how producing a PR for this with test cases, getting it reviewed, then shepherding through a typical QA/Staging/Prod pipeline would take less then a day for any code base of reasonable complexity.

Perhaps it wouldn't literally take 8 hours, but the focus shift of working on this would likely keep a dev from making much progress on other issues that day.