> tech managers look at tech debt as a thing to be maintained at a certain level

What they don't seem to understand is all debts have interest. In my current project our entire team is tripping over that interest created by one person. Though my manager is frustrated with me because I'm "spending too much time trying to understand". Btw, that is a few hours here and there, maybe a day for a rabbit hole which results in me creating a dozen or more issues. How is that "slow"?

  > allowing us to achieve perfection

Impossible

Look, I'll defend high quality code all day long. Good code allows you to move fast just like taking 30s to tie your shoe laces allows you to run faster.

But we can't write high quality if we pretend that perfection exists. Globally optional solutions are the exception, not the norm. There's almost always tradeoffs we need to make. The high quality code, the high quality engineering, is understating, tracking, triaging, and minimizing those tradeoffs. It is writing code that allows you to change those decisions as quick and effectively as possible. But perfection doesn't exist. It's a good thing to chase, like Utopia, but ultimately unobtainable. A good engineer knows how to triage.

Advocating for perfect code will be a losing battle. But we should not, even for a second, let that be interpreted as meaning quality doesn't matter. I'm still frustrated with people who say "don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough" as most of the people that say that believe "good enough" is "it looks like it is working" and call a "demo" a MVP