[bunderbunder]

I’ve seen many products die sudden, violent deaths due to unmanaged technical debt. If you have customers who care about quality and reliability, you simply cannot set up a false dichotomy between selling product and managing technical debt.

That said, I would also concede that over the past decade or two the clean code movement has made a damn strong effort of poisoning the term by trying to characterize technically inconsequential aesthetic concerns as technical debt.