I’ve seen many products die sudden, violent deaths due to unmanaged technical debt. If you have customers who care about quality and reliability, you simply cannot set up a false dichotomy between selling product and managing technical debt.

That said, I would also concede that over the past decade or two the clean code movement has made a damn strong effort of poisoning the term by trying to characterize technically inconsequential aesthetic concerns as technical debt.

“Chasing tech debt” vs “more sales” is a false dichotomy. A dangerous one, too, if you simply expand “chasing tech debt” to “listening to engineering concerns”. That’s how you end up with a Boeing.

Of course. But as an old sales guy used to tell me: "In the story, at the end the wolf shows up".