Technical debt is less analogous to financial debt, and more like an anchor. You want to move fast to keep up with the market, but your debt slows you down.
That sounds exactly like financial debt to me. Too much (financial or technical debt) is an anchor, healthy amounts of debt result in not being able to do everything / having some limitations but overall you're in a good place, and no debt probably means it's time to actively pursue opportunities. No?
With technical debt, each new feature now costs $nx where n is the multiplier for the accrued technical debt. A feature that you need in 2 months to support a market shift now needs 4 months to complete due to technical debt.
The issue with this oversimplified formula is that you cant accurately determine which debt affects which features. For some features it could be zero, and others it could be 100.
However, I do agree that all teams should be carrying an amount of technical debt to be healthy. It shows a certain quality of decision making to balance it well.
All too often though it becomes an excuse to procrastinate and that might as well be gambling.
I see this as interest on debt. When you have $1K of credit card debt, a $500 payment goes a long way. When you have $20,000, that same $500 is mostly covering interest, so you pay down the principal slower.
The additional complexity and work that comes with tech debt is the interest you pay on it.
Not really, I have seen whole features dropped. Like payment processing, business had an idea to use stripe, 6 month later all code deleted because our business model was not for people who would pay with stripe.
We also pivoted other application where only database stayed roughly the same. Loads of legacy stuff was still there but it is going to be phased out soon.
So I have seen situations where tech debt was never paid back. I have also seen one guy that is not paying me back my money, but I still remember he owes me. Some tech debt will go into oblivion in next year or two...
That anchor effect of being slow is what I meant by "installment payments". Financially, if you have enough debt you can make $300k a year and still live in a crappy apartment, because all of your income (in this weird metaphor, that's your available dev hours) are being spent on debt (fixing things that wouldn't have occurred had you not had the debt)
I will concede some points in your favor for that. I will counter with the fact that almost no CTO will change there deadlines accordingly, which leads to team burnout/turnover.