Debt doesn't imply it's productively borrowed or intelligently used. Or even knowingly accrued.

So given that the term technical debt has historically been used, it seems the most appropriate descriptor.

If you write a large amount of terrible code and end up with a money producing product, you owe that debt back. It will hinder your business or even lead to its collapse. If it were quantified in accounting terms, it would be a liability (though the sum of the parts could still be net positive)

Most "technical debt" is not buying the code author anything and is materialized through negligence rather than intelligently accepting a tradeoff