Every shortcut was a small loan against the future, taken at an interest rate nobody disclosed. The future arrived all at once, in the form of a single quarter where everything you deferred came due simultaneously. The "we'll fix it later" tickets, it turns out, all had the same later. Untested, undocumented, and unmonitored, the platform did the only thing such platforms ever do. It failed, quietly at first, then catastrophically, then on the news.
"Technical debt is just debt with a more reassuring name." — The Incident Review (it was not reassuring)