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.
Useful insight that some MBA types consider debt to be a good thing, so it makes sense to use a different term than technical debt. “Operational drag” doesn’t quite hit the mark though, IMO.
Accrued brittleness.