I’ve seen many products die sudden, violent deaths due to unmanaged technical debt. If you have customers who care about quality and reliability, you simply can

I’ve seen many products die sudden, violent deaths due to unmanaged technical debt. If you have customers who care about quality and reliability, you simply cannot set up a false dichotomy between selling product and managing technical debt. That said, I would also concede that over the past decade or two the clean code movement has made a damn strong effort of poisoning the term by trying to characterize technically inconsequential aesthetic concerns as technical debt.