This jives with what I observed as an intern some on an AWS team some years ago. The oncall rotations seemed absolutely brutal and the engineers were so busy and stressed out fighting fires that they barely noticed my existence (which I was okay with) and the tech debt kept accumulating between because between new feature launches and firefighting there wasn't much scope for anything else.

My intern project was a fairly no brainer tech debt item that automated a lot of the deployment process and saved our lead engineer several hours a week in babysitting deploys. I resolved to never work on a cloud infra team after that -- while the internship was fine, being a full time engineer seemed absolutely miserable.