This is quite literally how technical debt is created. The story said that there was already a set of bugs being worked on. Which means that by adding this, the technical debt backlog would only continue to grow.

I worked at a company where the technical debt was so deep that I really wanted to say that it was technically bankrupt, meaning that the software should be entirely rewritten. This goes against every grain of my experience to do, and we ended up not declaring technical bankruptcy, but if you want to understand where it starts, it's, we'll do it later.

Each of those decisions needs to be accounted for just like a credit card purchase.