true tech debt occurs when a business under-invests in their core technology over a long period of time, or deal with concept drift in its business. I know of multiple fortune 500's that are reliant on bespoke emulation of hardware and operating systems that haven't existed in decades, even worse the source code for the software they're running may no longer exist in any usable form.

In many modern web companies a given project has a useful life of ~3-5 years, if its still running by year 8 with a team that's been on KTLO a few things are probably true.

A: No one knows how to productively add features.

B: The business need for the project was much larger than the KTLO funding would imply.

Odds are at this point there are a long list of user complaints, year+ old feature requests, and excuses being made to the board for why some initiative is facing yet another delay.

Perhaps we should be talking about software depreciation rather than tech debt?