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It can depend; if it's because of sloppy programming (such as using string concatenation a lot instead of using a string builder, for example) then it's tech debt. If it's designed like that, then it's an architectural problem. I do think any naively implemented program should be able to scale up one order of magnitude, but two orders of magnitude require a new architecture.

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Came to say something similar; I see it with library choices a lot as well; poor library choices ~= sloppy programming. I've had a lot of issues in the the past with 'conventional wisdom' lib choices that result in a lot of re-work as predictable issues with those choices arise.

Sometimes, choosing to use a library in the first place may also implicitly increase technical debt (in having to maintain this dependency, and even more so if this library shares dependencies with other dependencies that you have).

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