Development is only a step of the whole process of selling a good. One must consider the entire pipeline, from sales to QA, in order to understand where are the bottlenecks. At one point, _if_ technical debt becomes a problem, non-tech people will pin-point this cause, and they will ask for either mitigation or resolution.

When found, the entire pipeline should be made aware of the bottleneck, because some small changes at some steps could lead to huge gains in other steps. Example : "if ops could do this thing, we could remove the entire library from the codebase" (ops), or "that feature was actually never used" (customer feedback), or "if we can get the customer to accept this alternative, we wouldn't need this piece of complicated sub-feature" (need sales)

Then, even the smallest change could impact all other steps such as tests, documentation, reviewing, sales, QA, etc

Personal preference : I would rather hire developers who ship the requested ticket/story, rather than "fixing tech debt" under the hood. To drive the entire company, all its parts must correctly report and correctly execute.

Edit : from the article , “We’re in a build the plane while flying situation, how can we get this out now without doing a big rewrite?” is exactly what non-tech people would ask, because they can take action to mitigate at other steps of the process