Tech debt has rules. You cut a corner to ship on time, you write a comment that says TODO fix this, and six months later someone pays it down. It is annoying but it is bounded. A senior engineer can look at a codebase with tech debt and draw a map of where the bodies are buried.
Yep.
I expect that in small codebases the effect will be manageable but anything beyond that… It’s just a matter of time.