This assumes that the engineers in question get to choose how to allot their time, and are _allowed_ to spend time to add graceful failure modes. I cannot tell you how many stories I have heard of, and companies I have directly worked at, where this power is not granted to engineers, and they are instead directed to "stop working on technical debt, we'll make time to come back to that later". Of course, time is never found later, and the 3am pages continue because the people who DO choose how time is allocated are not the ones waking up at 3am to fix problems.
Definitely an issue but I think there's a little room for push back. Work done outside normal working hours is automatically the highest priority, by definition. It's helpful to remind people of that.
If it's important enough to deserve a page, it's top priority work. The reverse is also true (if a page isn't top priority, disable the paging alert and stick it on a dashboard or periodic checklist)
