> showstopping technical debt is unavoidable is very new

No it's not. The push and pull between shipping and paying down technical debt is as old as there's been software to sell. Sales has been selling features that don't exist quite yet ever since they've been talking to customers, and engineering has been pushing back on implementing them yesterday since there's been features to implement. Showstopping technical debt is merely a side effect of who wins that argument in a given org.

Yes.

My point is the technical debt is stopping the show way more often.

Not “this never existed before selling”,

but “we never had the team in place who could do this right in the first place”.

You can quibble about who is responsible, but the fact remains.