I think the answer here is to point your current tickets higher. When someone asks for estimates on time, or points, you give a higher estimate so as to not leave as much tech debt behind. In theory or course, may not work in practice.
At some point though, many of the original assumptions about problems are understood to have been fundamentally wrong/misaligned, and need some revisiting. You need to touch old code, whether to delete it, or to have it align with new standards or new ... whatever. Touching anything that didn't relate to an explicit 'agreed on' jira ticket was seen as wrong/bad. I ended up bundling in 'fixes' of unrelated stuff when working on 'new' stuff because... it had to get done, but was ignored or rejected during any sort of planning.
I've heard it said that "to go fast, do it alone. to go far, you need a team". I can get on board with that, but you need a team in agreement and competent. I have a colleague working on a small team and... they're mostly just completely inexperience and bad, but there's no self-awareness. Taking direction from the guy who was in high school last year, while ignoring the person who's lead multiple teams and has delivered high value software for 20 years... that's a bizarre imbalance that can't be fixed with 'sprints' or process alone.