You might be ducking the hypothetical. It's not just communication.

> Unlike acne, it won't get better if you don't pick at it.

Actually, that's exactly what technical debt is: stuff that's better left alone for the moment. The problem is that those decisions pile up and bury you.

> Engineers aren't engaged with the product vision or the customer base,

> It's engaging people on the same goals and making sure each of them knows how their part fits with the others

You don't get 15 years of technical debt in organizations where it's possible for everyone to know everything. Your solution increases coordination costs, but that's exactly what blocks decisions on the merits, when people who know little or have little stake have the same say.

The solution is accountability, but I've never seen that introduced successfully on a large scale to a corrupted organization. Typically instead it starts in a small team, and that team grows to manage the entire stack; sometimes they start internally, but more commonly they come via merger or spin-out.

More generally, technical debt is a self-replicating attractive nuisance. Anyone can see and complain about it and use it as an excuse. Very few can fashion a solution, and those who do it without throwing out the system are rarer still. So the culture evolves to sustain it, selecting for people who know just enough to avoid it but not enough to fix it.