I feel like the biggest problem from a business strategy perspective is all we have are these personal opinions and gut feels. Even this article mentions having

I feel like the biggest problem from a business strategy perspective is all we have are these personal opinions and gut feels. Even this article mentions having done 20 code audits, but presents nothing but qualitative findings. Ideally, some business school out there would be embedding researchers in randomly selected startups to know for sure how often you fail because of tech debt versus failing because of worrying too much about tech debt. That's an empirical question, yet all we get are informed expert opinions, but no auditable, reproducible research evidence. It's all so unscientific. Not to say you're wrong, but we have no real way of even deciding. All I can do is lean on my own experience, but I've seen nowhere near every product team out there and the ones I have seen are nothing close to randomly sampled or blinded.