I like the framing of tech debt as value-neutral; whether it's good or bad depends on how you use it (just like financial debt). Of course, all else being equal, you'd rather have zero debt.

One higher level consideration that's particularly relevant for early-stage startups, is that you often simply don't have time to build the ideal "tech-debt free" solution. Focusing on 80/20 solutions almost necessarily involves adding tech debt. However, if you're mindful about where you take on tech debt, and commit to tapering and then paying it down as your resources grow, then you're more likely to avoid the debt spiral where your development grinds to a halt, due to everything breaking all the time.

One other point I'd make is that a common form of "tech debt" for early-stage startups is simply doing things that don't scale; it's often beneficial to make your domain models flexible so that you can support one-off manual interactions, for example if a new customer appears that requires it. Then automate that thing and constrain the domain actions once you have collected enough use-cases to know what makes sense to forbid.