Written by someone that doesn't have much of a grasp on tech or programming - and no, being a reporter covering tech doesn't mean you know anything about programming...sounds more like someone shilling for a consulting company licking their chops to get some laws passed to force companies to rewrite everything new from scratch. Not unlike the boondoggle that was Y2K, for those of you old enough to have been developers during that ridiculous exercise. Don't get me wrong - never made so much money in my life rewriting things that didn't need to be rewritten in the first place, but in many, many cases was completely unnecessary.
Is there technical debt in some old systems? yes. Is there technical debt in systems written 3 months ago? absolutely. They are both equally likely to have at least some technical debt - taking a system already running in production, perhaps written in cobol 20+/- years ago, even with some known problems - and paying someone to rewrite the entire thing in the newest framework de-jour, imo, is just (if not more) likely to introduce new bugs and new technical debt as it is to solve any problems with the old system.
Sure, if the system no longer meets your business needs, and no one can figure out how to fix or maintain it - then by all means, consider an upgrade - but if it is not (seriously) broke - don't fix it.