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leaving the codebase cleaner than you found it IS creating maximum value to the company because large changes are almost never walking on the knife's edge between "making the codebase better" and "making the codebase worse". Your codebase either gets better over time, or it gets worse. If it's getting 0.01% worse with every PR, that tech debt accumulates at 1.0001*(# of PRs) which grows faster than you'd think.

Having a maintainable codebase is of MASSIVE LONG-TERM value to a company - far too many orgs are paralyzed by mountains of tech debt.

Doing the minimal work possible is fine for 1-off hotfixes or tweaks or small features, but your argument assumes "maximum value to the company" is measured in the span of of a sprint, and it's not.

Cleaning up the codebase incrementally does deliver value to the company as long as you understand "cleaning up" as "making it easier and faster to contribute to, change, or debug in the future" rather than something adjacent to a form of performance art.