People outside of engineering can't give engineers immediate credit for long-term decisions. They don't have the competency to know what to reward.
I'd go further and say that even within engineering, people outside of a team can't give immediate rewards for work whose long-term value is internal to the team, for the same reason: they don't know if the work you're doing is actually valuable or is just superficially similar to the kind of work that often does have long-term value.
If you're confident enough in your long-term decisions, and how you spend slack time, then you should be fine with being rewarded for delivery, since you expect your long-term work to pay off in future delivery and future rewards.
I'd go further and say that even within engineering, people outside of a team can't give immediate rewards for work whose long-term value is internal to the team, for the same reason: they don't know if the work you're doing is actually valuable or is just superficially similar to the kind of work that often does have long-term value.
If you're confident enough in your long-term decisions, and how you spend slack time, then you should be fine with being rewarded for delivery, since you expect your long-term work to pay off in future delivery and future rewards.