Who should dictate the technical vision and pace? The product or engineering team?

Trust between the engineering team and business stakeholders is crucial. Asking for 6-months of non-feature work erodes that trust. Non-technical people become suspicious and think they are being tricked. The technical team must communicate with the business to educate them on the consequences of ignoring technical improvements. Start signalling possible issues when choosing feature work over technical debt early on. Don't complain behind closed doors about the bad state of the codebase because you want to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. Be honest with the non-technical stakeholders.

No one should dictate technical vision and pace. The path forward is deliberate choice-making through open dialogue. Every decision about technical direction should be a collaborative effort in which all stakeholders understand and accept the tradeoffs.