It is all about proper balance. Too little debt is inefficient, too much and you are getting overwhelmed.
The metaphor for piling crap on crap would be a Ponzi scheme. You pay your debts by making bigger debts. It works as long as you find suckers, it will break down eventually.
I was going to write that there's no reason you'd want financial debt qua financial debt, and that's sort of true but I realized that credit ratings complicate things. Sometimes an important part of what you're getting in exchange for the debt (and its repayment) is capacity for borrowing more when it first-order matters in the future, by way of establishing a reputation for being able to handle debt correctly.
Mapping this back to software seems interesting. I can't think of a parallel for credit reporting agencies, but it's certainly the case that a team might be more (or less) willing to take on technical debt to meet the schedule desired by a manager or a PM if there is a history of allowing them room to pay down the debt later (or failing to).
Yes you actually do want debt because it is tax shield.
Under what circumstances?
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference ?