alt Hacker News> Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset
There definitely is a technical debt bankruptcy option.
You can stop using a particular piece of code or technology, e.g. by replacing it (with new code, or a third-party/vendor solution), or re-architecting a system or business process so that the code's function is no longer needed.
This is exactly what the technical debt metaphor means. Short-lived systems can accumulate a lot of technical debt without as much concern, because you're planning to declare bankruptcy (deprecate and decommission) the code soon anyways; long-lived systems must plan to pay off their technical debt on the usual installment plan.
Yes, a rewrite or replacement is the software analogue of the debt metaphor.
Section 3 of the article elaborates more on the technical debt statement in the TL;DR, but the gist of the argument there is that for a lot of systems, the rewrite is not really an option. Pretending it is an option is a partial contributor to the attitudes that make the debt spiral (or so I argue).
Yes, sometimes a rewrite is possible but the success stories are uncommon and are far outnumbered by failures.