That is very true. I re-read my comment and realized it might come across as being critical of folks in academia not caring about technical debt, which was not

That is very true. I re-read my comment and realized it might come across as being critical of folks in academia not caring about technical debt, which was not the intention. Technical debt in these scenarios is usually limited to a single paper cycle (or maybe 2). This is avoided with simple practices such as planning out your code with comments before writing it, not copy-pasting code into 3 or 4 places, etc. There isn't much overhead, but it saves a fair bit of time debugging issues caused by human error. It also ensures you write as little code as necessary for the problem at hand. I completely agree that when it's just a single paper, there is not much need to ensure you have an elegant library which can be re-used.