I have never seen an Ops team being rewarded for avoiding incidents (focusing in tech debt reduction), but instead they get the opposite - blamed when things go wrong.

I think it's human nature (it's hard to realize something is going well until it breaks), but still has a very negative psychological effect. I can barely imagine the stress the team is going through right now.

Ops has never been "rewarded" at any org I've ever been at or heard about, including physical infra companies.