You can ignore it, tie it to unrelated company initiatives, or feign ignorance and simply not offer solutions that add to it. Or… you can adopt more above-board techniques such as Crawl/Walk/Run and the Reverse Farmer’s Rule, which reframe projects so that confronting tech debt is an upfront part of the plan.
Accrued brittleness.
I really like the signalling here: “things might break unless we address it, and we did it to ourselves.”
Or maybe “superfluous cost of ownership” to speak to the bean counters, but yours is way better.
Who are we kidding, “tech debt” is what we’re stuck with. But have an upvote nonetheless.