You can ignore it, tie it to unrelated company initiatives, or feign ignorance and simply not offer solutions that add to it. Or… you can adopt more above-board techniques such as Crawl/Walk/Run and the Reverse Farmer’s Rule, which reframe projects so that confronting tech debt is an upfront part of the plan.
I ended up on a project to integrate an HR system with Active Directory.
Did we technically have to insist that the HR system became the source of truth and we would never make manual changes on the AD side? No.
Did we have to use the new integration and automated new hire account creation process to punish the managers who kept trying to get new hires processed at 4pm Friday to start Monday, claiming no way to rush the processing so the previous “rule” about lead time was now set in stone? No.
Did the integration actually force the reorganization of our Active Directory to clean up a decade of band aid fixes layered on top of each other? No.
Did we have to finally implement a proper data retention process including deletion of former user accounts and mailboxes for the integration to work, along with formal methods to request temporary access to old mailboxes that included an automatic time limit? No.
Did my boss and I use it as a golden opportunity to push all of the above and more into official standards, saving an absurd amount of man hours since? Fuck yes.
Not all of it was tech debt, sure, but in short you should use a available opportunities to improve as much as you can, instead of always defaulting to “I do exactly what was requested”. If for no one else, do it to save yourself pain in the future.