In the contemporary tech industry, there's a pretty good chance that the managers who oversaw the decision to incur technical debt are not going to be the managers who make the call whether to "repay" it. It might not even be the same programmers. The "debt" metaphor makes a lot of sense when you're saying "you are asking for something that will incur a cost that we will later need to repay". It seems less effective when you're saying "your predecessor's predecessor asked my predecessor's predecessor for something that probably made sense at the time, but now we 'owe' some work on fixing the problem they left us".
The thing with actual debt is that you have to pay it back, because you agreed to do that in a formal way. That's not the case with technical debt. No one says you have to pay it back. That's why I think the metaphor falls flat when you use it with business stakeholders.
