Provocative, I like it.

However, you haven't really debunked it as a myth. It still exists, you just correctly attributed its root cause for some kinds of organisations.

It is still a kind of debt manifesting in a technical asset. That is what makes it technical in nature, in most peoples mental model.

For example, I have technical debt in my own open source project. No one is forcing me to put it there, or tolerating it being there except me - the engineer.

Technical debt is actually completely unavoidable. It is a by-product of making any software system. Yes, it is there due to tradeoffs that I am deciding upon, since I have control over the full development of the software, and all its shortcomings. Some of those tradeoffs are strategic in nature; like not being able to have all the basic capabilities of the product yet, I have to make compromises.

You are only talking about orgs where top down management gets to micro-manage or control technical teams and how much money/time they get to spend on any one thing/initiative (because they think they know better about the future than the team does). This is most prevalent in Banks and other Enterprise software departments, where they see tech separate from the actual business it serves. They will never see the software or product outcomes as due to tech rather then their own expertise, for several decades away.

This is not the case so much in tech product companies, where tech teams have a broader view of the whole product and more autonomy over finance to manage their technical debt more strategically over time.

I think you should make that distinction, in such a broad topic, because it is real and the gap between enterprise development and product companies is widening these days, and much of your audience does not experience what happens at Banks anymore.