No one is clearing the backlog right now, though. Every new change that's incoming is another 5,000 lines of change, and even if that solves the current problem at hand, it creates 5 new follow-up tickets for new edge cases that come from this huge change. At least that's the constant reality I see day to day.
I dispute this, although only from observation.
The latest frontier models are producing significantly higher quality output. And the usual reason to introduce tech debt (deadlines) is less relevant.
Indeed, I know multiple companies fixing decades of bugs and security issues in just the last few months.
Eh, I will say the back log and a number of long standing issues where I work has been addressed more than I'd even seen in the past. There were a number of more minor issues being a pain in my ass for a couple of years that in a session with the devs were ironed out. Also a few rare bugs that had been around forever were fixed when they set up agents with a description of the issue and the agents ran loops while developing a theory on how to trigger it and then debug it.