Are you discounting that technical debt is a thing/matters? What gets delivered isn't just a set of features, it's a piece of software, which implements those

Are you discounting that technical debt is a thing/matters? What gets delivered isn't just a set of features, it's a piece of software, which implements those features, but might have a whole bunch of baggage attached which can make it really hard (or easy) to change those features or add new features in the future, or to allow the software to adapt to changing external conditions. I don't think this is specific to software. E.g., I'd imagine it'd be possible to build a building a lot faster if you didn't need to worry about it not collapsing in five years. --- Though to be fair, the mere presence of technical debt on its own is not a problem; there is some amount of technical debt that's appropriate, and it's hard to know exactly where that is. You certainly can't get by just ignoring it completely.