> These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams

...the author has reached the wrong conclusion from this. The problem is they weren't able to articulate why the modernization tasks were business priorities, not that the modernization wasn't a business priority in the first place.

If the tech debt is problematic, fixing it will presumably bring a number of benefits (faster development cycles, reduced defect rates, etc). They were doing the wrong work - they were doing a terrible job explaining why that work was necessary.

In many ways, tech debt and modernization is a near guaranteed way to have business impact, in a way product work is not. If you're at Meta and you figure out how to save 1% of total CPU time on the server by fixing some tech debt you can expect to be showered with money.