The ugly code can be dealt with. But we can't dealt the ugly environment. The most severe technical debt is the environment, that is OS, toolchains, framework,

The ugly code can be dealt with. But we can't dealt the ugly environment. The most severe technical debt is the environment, that is OS, toolchains, framework, library, were fixed at the time development started. Updating the environment shall be part of the cost of development, but we tend to ignore it for more present short term gain, burden the cost to the future self. Within a few years, the environment is too old to work with. We have to deal with the bugs that were fixed years ago in upstream, reinvent the features that was also present in the upstream. 5 years past and we seriously consider updating the environment but since there was no update, existing code relies on old behaviours so we have to fix all of them but that doesn't introduce any short term gain so updating was abandoned. 10 years past and software is dead.