[craftinator]

> I am someone else who apparently never understood what technical debt was supposed to mean.

I've always assumed engineers (myself included) write code to the best of their abilities to solve a given problem at the time.

Another way of looking at technical debt, that I unfortunately must use regularly, is debt accrued by not updating systems. I work with hardware and software that is, in some cases, from the 80's. As these machines age, they become more and more likely to break. The longer we wait to replace them, the more value their initial investment is worth, but also the greater the chance that production will be halted for months while we try to design and implement a new system. So this is technical debt accrual as a function of time, not as a function of development speed.