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.
To me it sounds like they took a lot of shortcuts and everyone from the team, barring the last engineer standing, were driven away by the looming Mount Debt