When scopes creep and requirements change, simply refactor. Where is it written in The Law that you have to accrue technical debt? EDIT: I'm gonna double down on this one. The fact that your organization thinks they can demand of you that you can magically weathervane your codebase to their changeable whims is evidence that you have failed to realistically communicate to them what is actually possible to do well. The fact that they think it's a move you can make to creep the scope, or change the requirements, is the problem. Every time that happens it should be studied within the organization as a major, costly failure--like an outage or similar.

> it's impossible to get business buy-in to rearchitect or refactor to the degree that is necessary

That's a choice. There are some other options:

- Simply don't get business buy-in. Do without. Form a terrorist cell within your organization. You'll likely outpace them. Or you'll get fired, which means you'll get severance, unemployment, a vacation, and the opportunity to apply to a job at a better company.

- Fight viciously for engineering independence. You business people can do the businessing, but us engineers are going to do the engineering. We'll tell you how we'll do it, not the other way.

- Build companies around a culture of doing good, consistent work instead of taking expedient shortcuts. They're rare, but they exist!