The tech debt always gets paid one way or another. Either preemptively, as part of ongoing maintenance; or after a data breach in the subsequent lawsuit and settlement; or in the slow, inexorable trickle of increased infrastructure costs and lost business from slow dependencies and ineffectual bandaid solutions.
Another payment option is not tackling it at all and just “paying the interest” by having a larger engineering team to wrangle the beast than you would otherwise have needed.
The tech debt always gets paid one way or another. Either preemptively, as part of ongoing maintenance; or after a data breach in the subsequent lawsuit and settlement; or in the slow, inexorable trickle of increased infrastructure costs and lost business from slow dependencies and ineffectual bandaid solutions.
Another payment option is not tackling it at all and just “paying the interest” by having a larger engineering team to wrangle the beast than you would otherwise have needed.