Ward Cunningham coined the term “technical debt” to describe a particular category of project issues. Those issues required refactoring to make it easier to work with the codebase but did not affect the final product delivered to the customer.
That was thirty years ago.
It was a period populated with client-server architectures, long before Clouds and the Internet became integral parts of system runtimes.
Fast-forward to modern cloud-based architectures and a poorly organized interface is no longer a bucket of bytes inside an object file; it is a web of calls among micro-services.