I've seen projects die not because of the technical debt existing, but because of lack of addressing it. The developers got sick of working around the debt to d

I've seen projects die not because of the technical debt existing, but because of lack of addressing it. The developers got sick of working around the debt to do trivial things, they left. Customer support personnel left because of the constant manual "tweaking" they had to do due to the technical debt. Management focused on tacking on features instead of paying off any technical debt which was having rippling effects throughout the company. Technical debt destroyed the team.