Ideally, you avoid tech debt altogether by writing clean code. That said, there's always legacy code, and you can't spend all your time refactoring it, so I think of it as a balance. For systemic issues, you can tackle some kinds of tech debt along with tickets that touch the same code, and for others, you just need a dedicated chunk of time to spend on it. Also. Conventions are valuable, even if they're not 100% optimal, so in some cases it's useful to continue the status quo. Finally, sometimes you need to make sacrifices and introduce tech debt to accomplish a business goal, because ultimately the success of the business is what's important.