This also assumes that "nightmarish tasks" don't involve things that could lose you your job. I've worked to dodge plenty of tasks, both personally and on a team, where I felt that taking on that task would set me or my team up for failure in ways that could cause me issues with my career.
There's plenty of "have this baby in a month" tasks that I don't want to become entangled in.
Why would they? What is a shitstorm anyway? Most people don't really care about the company... They care about feeding their family and shitstorms are only shit if you care right?
I'd rather be paid money to write code/do technical work instead of getting into bikeshedding fights with opinionated members of other teams.
There's plenty of tickets I put off doing because I know it will be hard to feel like I'm making progress, or frustrating to navigate the social component of.
Sure, maybe if I approached my work totally dead inside and with no expectation of enjoying it or caring about anyone else I worked with, I could probably just mechanically go down the list of tasks, but I suspect that would also cause me a lot of other mental problems on the way.
not most engineers I know; they need to make money and will just do whatever to make that money.