“Technical debt” seems like an objective description of a real thing. Complex software systems that actually get used and adapt to requirements over time inevitably accumulate cruft, bugs, less than ideal design and implementation in hindsight. That’s in the nature of software development, a feature rather than a bug.

When programmers talk about “technical debt” they actually mean to communicate their boredom, disdain, impatience, fear of working with legacy code they didn’t write. They imagine how they might do it better now and judge the legacy system in that light. Programmers strongly prefer creating something new, and that bias leads to judging code that works by its flaws and shortcomings, magnifying them and calling them “technical debt,” giving the liabilities 10x more weight than the business value.