One of my favorite quotes from a former colleague is "conversation creates its own weather patterns". For me, anytime if seen the words "tech debt" thrown around it starts to just weigh everyone down. People just start repeating the words over and over for all sorts of very tractable issues. The amount of time I've seen it falsely attributed/claimed is obscene.

1. Switched to microservices or a new language or anything more modern in 1 part of the codebase? Yea everyone now calls anything not that tech debt.

2. Have a performance problem and want to add more features? "Tech debt"

3. The code is just bad - "tech debt"

In all of these cases I feel like clean-up should just be constant and mostly opaque. The campfire rule is so great for these things - "just make the campground a little better than when you got there". It often does not take more time to just clean-up as you go. Then once you have your barings on a certain part of the codebase bigger changes will seem smaller and you can fix those up as well OR buy yourself that 2 weeks with a specific plan/ask. Eng cultures that worked this way seemed to work the best.