Really strange. What industry have you seen this in.
In big tech, enterprise, biotech, every team I've been on has uniformly understood that technical debt is just a concept of future work that is intentionally put off to focus speed, exploration or some other reason. It's used in strategic planning to determine the cadence of output.
Aside from new grads this has never been a concept I've had to explain to an engineer or pm. Not like a sometimes thing. Literally never. Just very strange.