This seems far too focused on dev tech debt, which has a very narrow scope. I like the article, so I'm not knocking it, just offering a little perspective. As a senior sysadmin in the past my primary issues have been technical debt across the entire board, number one being too few hires for too much workload due to cheap or nearsighted execs, but I would definitely agree that contagion is a great term for how techdebt grows faster the longer it's left alone.

It's worth remembering the CTO and senior sysadmin and a few others are dealing with all the tech debt of the entire company and IT department of which dev is only a subset (of course this depends on the company, but on HN sometimes I see convos like this where it feels devs are just talking at each other and not receiving much outside feedback.)