I go further and simplify: "delete code" whenever and where possible. The term "Tech Debt" is really overloaded; I think the idea that "all code is liability" is better for framing the issue and strategies.
You have to be good at your job, good at the specialty, and more interested in doing the right thing for the company (and more irritated at the stupidity of the files being there 10 years after they were needed) than you are at looking productive to management. Management does not want to hear “well there was a directory structure of two million files that was a backup of a Linux machine from 8 years ago, I spent two days extracting the dozen files that we might need some day, getting the okay to proceed, and deleting the files.”