[etripe]

Not being able to use the shiniest version of everything isn't tech debt, it's brownfield development or maintenance mode. Using deprecated versions (beyond LTS), ignoring security advisories, and not replacing unmaintaned OSS packages are. It's a bit facile to reduce all of that to developers just being juvenile divas.

In some cases, tech debt is as small a threat to business continuity as IT security is. That is, it isn't a problem till it's suddenly a massive problem. In other cases, it causes development cost to slowly increase over time, at which point it depends whether the organisation/cash flow can bear it. Your proverbial moat, or perhaps corporate momentum.

I would question whether incurring tech debt is generally really part of a greater strategy at the organisational level. It's a symptom of myopia. In any place I've worked, it wasn't a balancing act, but rather being willfully ignorant about the application lifecycle, technology, security implications and knock-on effects. No one said "let's move fast and fix 'er up later". At least not in earnest.