Exactly. Execs see the monthly spend, people actually doing the work see the long-term externalities and hidden costs. Many, many people I know would and do buy more expensive (often Made in USA but not always) products when doing so means that the products will last longer and need less maintenance. Treating labor as commodities implies that the labor is interchangeable. Everyone who's actually done the work knows that it's not. There's no shortcut to paying for good talent.
Or they won't discover, because they'll be 5 years gone onto the next company, and the product will slowly decay under the cost of upkeep of its technical debt and the business fail.
The free market is not, in fact, perfectly frictionless. Executive decisions still matter and can make the difference between having, say, a photo sharing site that people like to use, and having one that's shut down because they can't pay to fix the legacy code.
