That's pretty much it. Tech debt makes it progressively harder to change a system. As it accumulates, making a change approaches 'impossible' while the work req

That's pretty much it. Tech debt makes it progressively harder to change a system. As it accumulates, making a change approaches 'impossible' while the work required to do it approaches 'infinite'. Throwing one more metaphor at it: If you don't scrub the barnacles off a ship, the ship will progressively become more difficult to steer. In fact it will eventually make sense to simply scrap the ship altogether. In software we call it a 'legacy application'.