the article is good, but i can't help the feeling that it is just applying a clever name to a common sense principle that is relevant to just about every field (including finance and technology)
It's also a good tool to allow the management to do what management does best: take the technical information and make management/financial decisions based on it, on how much investment can be made now.
It turns a binary either/or choice: devs saying "Our code is bad, we need to rewrite" into a quantitative one: "How much technical debt do we have? Is it increasing? Can we reduce it?".