I disagree that the interest costs of technical debt feel invisible. I personally feel a very heavy burden when cutting technical corners / coding to specifics

I disagree that the interest costs of technical debt feel invisible. I personally feel a very heavy burden when cutting technical corners / coding to specifics rather than the elegant generic cases. Indeed I spend a large amount of time in meetings persuading non-tech people of the impact of their (often technical-debt unaware) instincts. If you are in an organisation which is unable to measure, even in broad terms, the impact of technical debt, then that organisation is probably not run by the kind of people who should be managing a tech business. It's why most successful startups in the past 10 years have been run by people who understand code.