i dislike the term "technical debt." we don't know the trade offs someone made while building a system. often times, it's too few people to do the perfect job, so we decide to do the best we can over the whole solution. for instance, we could all probably do a better job with accessibility, but often times we can't afford the time with stakeholders wanting other things. i don't see it as "debt" but more as the typical trade offs we have make when prioritizing work.
i hope we get to a place where we keep the same number of developers employed as today, but leverage ai to make all software better across the board. hopefully the people in power realize that we've been understaffed this whole time.
I sometimes hear "We have so much technical debt! We're using Mongo when we really should be using Postgres for this data structure."
Not technical debt, just a preference for doing things a different way (which admittedly might be a better way, but just because there's a better way doesn't mean the current way is bad)
Sure it's debt if the choice to use mongo causes the bad decision to seep out into other parts of the codebase.