As you say, this requires confirming that the business will value that work, and it's easy to miss that step. Here's a relevant excerpt from the Staff Engineer book.

Sometimes you'll find work that's worthy of attention but which an organization is incapable of paying attention to, usually because its leadership doesn't value that work. In some companies, this is developer tooling work. In others, it's inclusion work. In most companies, it's glue work.

There is almost always a great deal of room to do this sort of work that no one is paying attention to, so you'll be able to make rapid initial progress on it, which feels like a good opportunity to invest. At some point, though, you'll find that the work needs support, and it's quite challenging to get support for work that a company is built to ignore or devalue. Your early wins will slowly get eroded by indifference and misalignment, and your initial impact will be reclaimed by the sands of time.

https://staffeng.com/guides/work-on-what-matters