Every old time software dev knows that sometimes you have to resist management and go do the thing that makes the software actually work

Yeah but the management nearly always wins in the end and makes you do the quick and dirty solution. The amount of decades old absolute ass legacy code I've had to deal with in my early professional days was insane and the same code is probably still clanking on. It's always easier for management to get results quickly and then pay the price in man hours and misery of the devs later.