Of course code quality is important, but some good points here, and I agree that 'technical debt' is quite different from financial debt. For example (beyond the points made in the post) maybe you have 'technical debt' on a bunch of code that becomes irrelevant and gets deleted (or reimplemented completely differently, or whatever) so that you never actually have to pay that 'debt'. I quite often find myself doing a kind of 'just in time refactoring' at the point where it becomes clear that code quality issues actually make it difficult to think about what the code is doing, or implement necessary changes.