A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.
Well, yeah - that never happens. You do tech debt cleanup “as you go”. Slip in a few tickets to cleanup specific things and have a policy to update code that is touched when adding features / fixing bugs.
It needs to be a continual cleaning process. That’s why it’s called debt - the longer you let it go un-paid the harder it is to do.