[0xbadcafebee]

If you have a car, and drive it 100 miles every day, and keep driving it for years, it will seem like everything is fine. Until one day the engine seizes up and it unexpectedly costs you $5,000 to fix, because you never changed the oil or did any other maintenance. There was never any apparent, obvious reason that maintenance was required. But no regular maintenance does lead to unexpected high costs.

It is critical that technical people have data to back up their claims that maintenance is needed. We need to identify exactly what each piece of tech debt is, how much work is needed to remediate it, and what the business cost of not remediating it is. Otherwise the business has literally zero idea what it will cost them not to do maintenance. This is an expected part of professional software engineering in a business. If you are not gathering this data and presenting it to leadership, do not expect them to take you seriously. It is up to you to prove your case.