Can't speak for the author, but to me "technical debt" is needed fixes that don't quite fit in a bug report because they don't fix any bug, and they don't deser

Can't speak for the author, but to me "technical debt" is needed fixes that don't quite fit in a bug report because they don't fix any bug, and they don't deserve a feature request because they don't add features. Therefore your taskmaster/overlord/scrum-master has no place to put them and in fact you'll have trouble convincing anyone, especially non-coders, that it needs to be done at all. So, track it in the code, since devs are the target audience and since "in the code" is where you'll be the next time you find yourself having to deal with "that kludge" again.