So true! I used to manage a project where one star engineer would always say we needed to stop work on features and re-engineer parts of the project so it "made more sense" or "wasn't a mess." We didn't have a lot of bugs or performance issues but this person felt parts of the code base were terribly designed and slowing down development. Other star engineers sort of agreed but did not consider it as urgent. But even when we set aside time to plan it they couldn't agree on a better design for the parts of the backend / app in question. One person's refactoring would have become another's technical debt.
So technical debt is certainly real but also sometimes in the eye of the beholder.
So technical debt is certainly real but also sometimes in the eye of the beholder.