That's one dimension of it, but in the context of this thread we are talking about how maintainable a codebase is for other humans. If your codebase is messy you depend on a few key employees and it might be hard to onboard new ones, so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt.

> so there has always been financial incentives to reduce tech debt.

Yes. In practice, this does not weigh against organisational resistance.

AI really makes it worse by adding an explicit numerical cost to doing anything.