As an architect, I fix bugs and do other kinds of maintenance. I don't ask for permission. It's a part of the job.
If you are in a team where the management doesn't allow you to fix bugs, it is your responsibility to lie to your management and fix them anyway.
Fearing a loss of employment is of course a valid reason to let a product rot, but that doesn't completely free you from this responsibility.
I worked on a project once that was a complete mess, they outsourced the QA of the product and the off-shore team was creating hundreds of dupe reports for each issue they found. Out came the burn-down charts, used as justification for requiring weekend work for the whole team.
I got tired of this and grabbed a couple other devs and split up the jira bug backlog between us, and we started closing out dupes and non-repro tickets, after about two days and thousands of tickets closed my manager angrily came over to my cube and demanded I stop because "it was making the company look bad".
Sometimes the best option is not to play.