Infrastructure Gravity is the motivation for Infra, DevOps, SRE teams to stay away from product feature code. This code is technical debt laden and highly specific to the company. In contrast all other technical work to have the software run (e.g. cloud infra, UNIX scripts) is company-agnostic and the skills highly portable.
Feature Lift is the motivation for Product teams to focus on feature shipping and feature work. The product engineer wants to ship visible changes to the system.
Infrastructure Gravity and Feature Lift create a sorting feature for engineers, pulling them up towards to Product work or down to Infrastructure work. This leaves the middle layer, the shared product work neglected1.
1. Danger, J. Executive Engineering: Practical Engineering Theory for Software Leaders. (The Technical Executive, 2024).