And debt is a really un-useful term for this, too, IMHO. More often than not, when you're down the line and dealing with the concequences of prior shortcuts the optimal solution you can think of now is different to the one you considered at the time of the original decision. And it also completely ignores the concept of great, perhaps also expensive, decisions taken in the past that are now no longer such a good fit. They weren't knowingly done as a debt, but the world changed.
The word "debt" has too much associated meaning. People understand the term too well. Instead I'd like people to just talk about "change" instead. Value judgements about the reasons we got here don't add anything useful to the decision on the tradeoff as to whether the suggested change is worth doing.