There are many reasons to not work on something immediately beyond "nobody cares". I've frequently run into situations where some small hack needed to be used t

There are many reasons to not work on something immediately beyond "nobody cares". I've frequently run into situations where some small hack needed to be used to work around a shortcoming in some major module. Fixing that module might not be something that can be done right away, either due to scheduling or resource constraints, or because that module's owned by some other team, or it's a 3rd-party component, or whatever. When that thing finally does get fixed or upgraded, it sure is nice to be able to just look up the master ticket for "Hacks to work around X" and easily find all the little things you can clean up right away. But, of course, if your tooling and team procedures force you to choose between "fix immediately" and "DFC", I suppose that would result in a lot of decisions to not even worry about technical debt. Over time, you could probably even lull yourself into thinking it was never technical debt in the first place.