The article to me feels like the author has a high appreciation of his own understanding of software development - and maybe even very rightly so - but doesn't want to put this in a certain language other people developed (in this case "agile" methods).

I don't believe technical debt can be avoided. And it seems counter to the "debt metaphor" that you take time away from working on current demands to save time later. There seems to be no real evidence that time spent now is necessarily worth more time later (beyond reasonable planning or avoiding really stupid decisions). The debt metaphor would actually mean that time now is worth more than time later (time value of time, if you will).

Probably it depends on where the time for "avoiding technical debt" is actually taken away from...