Do major design fails count as technical debt? Among other things I've run across an e-commerce site that required choosing a payment method before browsing pro

Do major design fails count as technical debt? Among other things I've run across an e-commerce site that required choosing a payment method before browsing products or putting things in the cart... (fortunately not my own job). (The reason for this odd choice was evidently that they wanted customers to have access to special offers/pricing/services/products depending depending on how they were going to pay. Cure worse than the disease type situation, IMO.) I think I've worked for a company that did essentially mostly screw itself with technical debt, though. They originally had overseas contractors write parts of their product without having a proper developer to assess and vet the results or requirements and it resulted in zero separation of concerns, business processes and display logic combined, and a terrible database structure. Eventually they wanted to move from their original layout and page design to a new one and it proved almost impossible without multiple developers spending around half a year. And even that was wasted effort because at the end of that they realized they wanted to actually have a mobile site and they still hadn't really created a good separation of concerns... Of course the whole time engineering and development wanted to refactor the business logic into separate code from the other layers, but management didn't want to expend resources on non-customer facing dev work. I think the product still exists, but they've killed their momentum.