Hello Amy,

I agree with all you say. But from my point of view, most of these cases describe bad code. And bad coding practices. I would limit technical debt to imperfect code that is sufficient to achieve its current purpose but not more.

But the result is the same. Once you have overly crappy code, you hardly get rid of it anymore.

If you force yourself to rather err on the over-engineering side, your life might be easier. Sure.