Yeah maybe "must" should be "ought to if you want to stay productive".
You can absolutely accumulate technical debt as a team and I think it's common and if it's just superficial fairly fixable, but I also think there's a tipping point where it just spirals out of control and more developer time is spent putting out fires than fixing root causes.
Maybe someone will contradict me, but I don't know of any examples where a large multi-developer code base has had systemic technical debt where this has been "fixed".
I for one won't contradict you. I believe it's a rite of passage for a senior developer to realise this, among other things.
I remember trying to push for refactoring back when I was just starting my career and being frustrated with the pushback. Little did I know the cost of doing that was even larger than interest on the tech debt we were dealing with, which in hindsight was still manageable at the time.
By the time I started participating in 20+ person monstrosities I was already aware of this and figured that once tech debt in such projects starts accumulating, there's no going back and my task is to do my best, but start sending out CVs.
You can absolutely accumulate technical debt as a team and I think it's common and if it's just superficial fairly fixable, but I also think there's a tipping point where it just spirals out of control and more developer time is spent putting out fires than fixing root causes.
Maybe someone will contradict me, but I don't know of any examples where a large multi-developer code base has had systemic technical debt where this has been "fixed".