I agree, and this is why I mentor my engineers to replace the phrase technical debt with specific qualities that are impacted by technical choices:

* Resistant to future change

* Won’t scale past x units

* Prone to operational issues

* Exposes us to liability or compliance risk

* Increases ongoing maintenance costs

Any large initiative to replace "crap" should map to specific product quality attributes that stakeholders and leadership buy in to, and ultimately be justifiable back to COGS or churn mitigation. In this way, objectively, a system can be $10M better because it e.g. closes $10M in customer tickets.