I will go even further - all code is bad and probably broken. Why bad - because if you put 10 engineers in the room and ask them to look at it, they will argue

I will go even further - all code is bad and probably broken. Why bad - because if you put 10 engineers in the room and ask them to look at it, they will argue about personal preferences and not about what code actually does. And you can always improve what you wrote, which means current state is far from good. STechnical debt is not a universal thing. You can have a debt free code, then new hire will argue that whole thing is going to collapse and needs to be rewritten. Even when rewriting it brings 0 ROI and it actually good as it is. I’ve seen fair share of engineering initiatives that were complete waste of time, caused by attempts to fight “tech debt”. The only good use of technical debt is to manipulate business folks into approving projects you want to work on. And I’m guilty of using it that way.