Technical debt is something that sinks projects, but it's by no means the only thing. This keeps engineers up at night, not project managers. A project manager worth his salt is worried about selling the wrong thing. Plenty of systems are messy, impossible to update, and wildly successful. I've worked on some of them. But few - if any - systems get away with solving a problem nobody has.
You hint that the goalposts have shifted for engineers, and that's a good point. Moore's Law gave us the room for a much stronger culture that worries about abstractions and meta-things like maintainability and cleanliness. But more importantly, technical restrictions have been lifted that previously prevented users from getting they software they need.
Technical debt is something that sinks projects, but it's by no means the only thing. This keeps engineers up at night, not project managers. A project manager worth his salt is worried about selling the wrong thing. Plenty of systems are messy, impossible to update, and wildly successful. I've worked on some of them. But few - if any - systems get away with solving a problem nobody has.
You hint that the goalposts have shifted for engineers, and that's a good point. Moore's Law gave us the room for a much stronger culture that worries about abstractions and meta-things like maintainability and cleanliness. But more importantly, technical restrictions have been lifted that previously prevented users from getting they software they need.