With software you can avoid the "pay it back" part - simply by retiring the software entirely.
But you cannot avoid the interest - as long as you keep maintaining and supporting the software, the debt present within, will cause extra work and extra pain.
That recurring interest can accumulate to the point, where it's more expensive to pay the interest, than it would be to just throw everything away and start from scratch. But you can't retire the old code before the new code is ready to replace it - and you don't have the capacity to write the new code while all your effort goes into maintaining the old code.
Your existing developers increasingly burn out on maintaining the old code, some might even quit, and you are unable to hire new developers, since they'd rather sign up for another company that isn't that deep into legacy problems.
This is the dead end you want to avoid - and the best way to avoid it, is to get rid of any technical debt as soon as possible. It's okay to make the strategic decision to take shortcuts in order to meet a deadline or keep a customer - but letting the resulting debt accumulate is not sustainable in the long run.