The same concept applies for system administration, your environment (read codebase) eventually gets so complex that it accumulates odd infrastructure bugs that

The same concept applies for system administration, your environment (read codebase) eventually gets so complex that it accumulates odd infrastructure bugs that pile up over time exactly like tech debt. Sometimes you must just spend time figuring out how this infra piece (read code block) that was implemented by someone long gone from the company even works. This usually involves having to fix it as well. You and your team must piecemeal the long term fixes if you want to make any progress towards understanding, scalability and reliability.