I agree. Tech Debt's original meaning has been usurped possibly forever. That's probably because there's so much Cruft when compared to the amount of OG Tech Debt.
I also feel that cruft is the unintended consequences of a lot of incentives. Not enough room for details here, but it's similar to the Tragedy of the Commons and the Prisoners Dilemma.
I now try to use "Technical Debt" in Ward Cunningham's original intent and "Cruft" for the short cuts that accumulate and eventually gum up the works in the implementation.
Tech Debt makes more sense as a term when consider with Cunningham's original intent too.
Modularity is the most important aspect regardless. Whether the system is deployed via a monolith or microservice is a decision that's based upon scalability and hopefully the system's modularity will support either option when needed.
