While I agree that in the abstract, technical debt can catch up to you, I'm just not sure that its impact is necessarily such that it cannot be contained or mit

While I agree that in the abstract, technical debt can catch up to you, I'm just not sure that its impact is necessarily such that it cannot be contained or mitigated. I mean UNIX is still around for 30 odd years. It hasn't sunk. It carries tremendous technical debt, in terms of bad design, in terms of implementation bugs that need to be carried forward, etc. My sense is that the more organizations that depend on a piece of tech, the more chance there is that it is going to age well, warts and all.