There are a couple of amazing talks by Dan North, where one of the ideas he shares is that the entire idea of technical debt is wrong - it implies that "good" code a team produced is an asset and "bad" code is debt, and applies a set of moral judgements where teams that produce this debt are bad. Instead - code is neither an asset or debt - it's just cost. It merely is a direct result of whatever effort the team has spent in the past, but at any moment it could be greatly simplified or even replaced by a new open source library or commercial tool. If good code was an asset, replacing it with something would be rare, but history shows us we keep replacing libraries and entire products despite some of them being made up of really great code.

> We need a different word. ‘Technical debt’ implies some kind of objectively quantitative zero sum game, when it is anything but.

Not only that, but it's been around long enough that bad management types throw the term around. That's a sure enough sign that whatever usefulness it had has been far outlived.