Most accessibility issues in your product were never that hard to solve to begin with.
You see, most people will instantly push back on that. What about the audit backlog? The WCAG? Costly retrofitting?
Most of that isn't the work. It's the work around the work.
It doesn't take long to write an alt tag, to fix a colour contrast ratio or to make sure form fields have labels. These aren't large problems and their solutions are well known. But when you ignore them long enough, overall they start to weigh down and feel large.
Still, the real cost isn't fixing these things, but the ongoing mental overhead of making decisions about them.
We rarely account for how much energy goes into making decisions, justifying them to ourselves, to stakeholders and to the users when we write accessibility statements.
The excuses take longer than the fixes.
Accessibility becomes an avoidance problem. And avoidance compounds. The longer you go without dealing with it, the more it starts to feel structural and core. Like changing it would mean changing everything. That feeling is rarely accurate, but it's very convincing.
You never intended to build an inaccessible product. But at some point, keeping it that way became a choice.
And the only way out is to make a different choice.