My feeling about it is that there is not a tension between refactoring and feature work but rather that a specific bit of feature work is best done with a refactoring. For instance about 10 components on a certain page I was working on all had the same accessibility problem which involved changed the HTML and then changing the CSS so this is a good chance to make a single component which can be used to replace the problematic code in all 10 components and to rationalize the CSS.

Yes, I have the same experience. Most of my features are implemented as double figures of tiny refactoring commits to prepare the code so that the feature can be implemented in a straightforward way.