This makes me think part of the problem with tech debt is that it means different things to different people. Some people might describe it as a codebase just n

This makes me think part of the problem with tech debt is that it means different things to different people. Some people might describe it as a codebase just not keeping up with this month's latest and greatest JS frameworks, but I think of it as something much more nefarious- low level shittiness and incoherency that tends to seep into long-lived large projects over time. Eventually the lack of refactoring to account for new features or behaviors turns it into a giant blob of spaghetti, where everything knows about everything and what should be minor, localized changes can have unforeseen consequences. This is harder to deal with IMO because it's something that appears so slowly that it's hard to stop in isolated instances ("WTF, you wanna rewrite this whole class instead of just commenting out that one line and adding one more tiny code path to fix this bug right now?!?"). That type of technical debt is more of a boiling frog problem where it's not obvious to everyone how bad it is until serious consequences have started to arise.