This is a good point, but I think it's very much in line with what the OP is saying. Technical debt hampers your ability to change. Anything you're scared of changing clearly fits that description.
Those workarounds that get created instead of changing the scary thing put me in mind of the "scar tissue" metaphor that SapphireSun proposed elsewhere in this thread.
I'm not disagreeing with the main thrust of the OP's argument, but with the statement that "Technical Debt isn't real".
I think that it often is best thought of as "real debt" in that it costs you time and attention, and (at least some of the time) that cost compounds over time. In other words, some of your engineering spend is just going to service this debt, not produce anything useful. That's a very real opportunity cost.
Those workarounds that get created instead of changing the scary thing put me in mind of the "scar tissue" metaphor that SapphireSun proposed elsewhere in this thread.