I bristle against most articles that posit "x isn't y, it's actually z"

(Speakers like Simon Sinek have made entire careers out of this specific rhetorical approach.)

In almost all cases, x is both y and z. Such is the truth about tech debt. Tech debt can but a strategic lever for success but is usually simultaneously a burden.

I don't find the examples in the article very on point. Twitter using publicly available storage systems until 2014 doesn't strike me as a form tech debt at all. Rather it is is a logical system design decision based on Twitter's business and organizational focus at the time.