[samhw]

No one is saying you have to needlessly screw things up. If you're writing things in an equally laborious but worse way, that's just being a bad programmer – nothing to do with tech debt.

Tech debt is more, say, "let's build this new bookmarking functionality by saving bookmarks locally" and then, later on, "let's make it more extensible by syncing them with the server, so we can build on it by e.g. using this information in our new recommendation algorithm".

It's about implementing things in a less complex but less extensible way, and perhaps a less feature-rich way, so as to more quickly validate user demand and thus iterate more quickly.

And yes, it's trivially true that you'll be slower than you could be otherwise by not doing this. You might think you're still faster than other people will be. I wouldn't bet my own money on that, but it's your prerogative to bet yours.