> If you don’t touch code, it doesn’t intrinsically degrade.

This is one misunderstanding of code quality which takes an absolute approach to measuring code health. Code health is relative to the changing requirements of it’s use. If you suddenly add a requirement that doesn’t fit existing design assumptions, the code hasn’t changed but the relative to the ideal has deviated...without touching the code.

The tech debt metaphor is not perfect. The pandemic has given us all a better metaphor: the code health epidemic. I’ve written about it here: https://sovilon.com/2020/05/15/atd-epidemic-prevention-respo...