"It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list."

"[...] But one where the tasks to accomplish the project are not anyone’s full-time job."

Sounds like the organization's leadership are incapable of balancing short term and long term goals, and it's falling to people who are paid less to "step up" and try to swim against the current for the good of the company.

or

Whatever the author is talking about is some engineering pipe dream disconnected from actual business value, and someone is dragging a bunch of other people semi-willingly along trying to execute on it without a mandate/funding from leadership.

Impossible to say which from the outside. But I've known several instances of both cases.