Quiet quitting web accessibility is easy to understand.
Shit, I've been close to that edge multiple times. The company doesn't really care. The people around you even less. The deadlines are brutal. Nobody's reviewing your proposals in sprint planning. Leadership talks about inclusion in the company meetings and then cuts accessibility from the budget yet again.
So you stop sweating it. Maybe you skip testing with a keyboard. Maybe you ship the form without proper error states. And you tell yourself it's fine, they won't notice.
And you'd be right. The people around you probably won't.
But be sure that somewhere, a person using a screen reader will. You haven't done it on purpose or out of malice. You did it just because you were tired and underpaid and fresh out of fucks to give. But because of you, that button has no label and the colour contrast is poor.
That's the real cost of not caring.
Accessibility isn't glamorous work. It doesn't get you promoted. Most of the time it's invisible, but that's exactly the point. When you do it well, nobody notices. When you don't, a whole group of people will.
Your employer might not deserve the effort. The people who keep saying "we'll fix it in the next phase" definitely don't deserve it.
But you do. And so do the people on the other side of your work.