Fair point, I work in a consumer facing, fast turn around, short lived code project industry. Not a typical software project with long life cycles.

These practices would almost certainly bite my company in the ass if we had to maintain anything for longer than year.

Occasionally, we do have to support a client for multiple years, and everytime it's a hilarious shit show trying to figure out how to keep all the project dependencies up to date. This is likely platform tech debt, and would be the beginning of the problem if we didn't have the privilege of being able to start over from scratch code-wise for each client's new order.

I guess I'm just in a lucky spot in the programmer pool where tech debt literally doesn't hit me as hard as it usually does others, and I just couldn't identify that before now lol

Instead of saying tech debt isn't that bad, my tune will change to something else. Like I said, I was on a team at one point that had a worse than usual tech debt problem, and it was unworkably stressful to deal with. Im guessing that experience is more typical of being near tech debt than my other experiences.