This is why you need sufficiently senior engineering leadership (both IC leadership and management). If you have engineers who meekly do whatever a non-technical stakeholder asks then you have a vacuum of responsibility, and sooner or later things will blow up catastrophically and whoever was least adept at CYA will get blamed.

On the other hand, almost any business problem can be solved in a reasonable way that doesn't send your system through any terrible one-way doors if you zoom out enough and ask enough whys. Of course not every place allows engineering to do that, but the ones that don't aren't able to retain senior folks because they will just go somewhere where their judgment is valued. Sometimes technical debt is the right thing for the business, but sufficiently senior engineers can set things up so there is always a way out. But what you can't do is uphold the purity of the system above the business problem. The systems are paid for by the business, so if you lose sight of that then you've lost the plot and the basis for your influence.