In the grand scheme of things, our lives are just frames of recognizability to one another, and we live on as the information that transformed via us forever. The cycle of innovation, and thereby of technical debt in software, seems to just be one where we either oscillate between caring about quality vs caring about innovation with a frequency proportional to how quickly we can communicate or a static power distribution of the same dichotomy. Either way, the lines we draw and the lengths of frames for when ideas, people, and companies "die" are all just emergent phenomena of the way we think, and pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things, don't ya think?