True, but in addition to that and I guess more important is to get the mandate to do that from the upper management. Make that mandate a part of your job role. Then whether the team likes it or not, truly respects you or not, an official mandate makes it doable.
The other side is while for very practical reasons teams create all kinds of debt to move forward, we also tend to settle into a working mode using the adage of don't fix if not broken, which can be very expensive if you need to scale or pivot, and this just does not apply to start ups. Most big companies that sink I think is because they have created all sorts of invisible debts and there are people who might have fixed it, but their passion not backed by a mandate never lets it get fixed!