Entropy is unavoidable is the outcome of any work occurring.
The risk of this happening is more or less measurable and is the debt. Denying responsibility doesn’t make the debt not exist. It might mean you’re so far removed from understanding how your (sub)systems function that you’re unable to assess it. It may be so complex that no one is able to quantify it, in which case I suppose “it doesn’t exist” might be accurate enough — either your business fails or it doesn’t based on the success of your subsystems, and your business outcome is the measurement. I’d rather have someone else be the measurement.
It's not a failure of anyone or anything, it's just a change in requirements.
So, within your framing, the point is just that when things change (due to no fault of your own) the whole organization has to adjust expectations or you have an organizational issue.
A new feature isn't tech debt... it's a new feature. I don't know for other people but at my workplace they're two very different types of TFS items.
No, technical debt does not only come from taking shortcuts. I would even go as far as saying that most of the time it does not come from taking shortcuts.
- You wrote a perfectly engineered system in Cobold 30 years ago that was state of the art then? Well, now all your Cobold developers have retired and you need to add new features to that tool. It's tech debt.
- Your tool was built to support 100 users but now it needs to support 100M? It's tech debt.
- You were getting some data from the Google Stadia API? Tech debt.
- You're using a library that just got an important security update? Tech debt.
As another commenter pointed out, the term "debt" was wrongly chosen. It's not debt. It's stuff that used to be perfectly fine and due to no fault of yours is not anymore.