I count knowledge debt as a superset. You can’t determine the state of a codebase without first knowing the decisions that were made when it was being written.

This, and I will accept being wrong, is why I think we see code we didn’t write and immediately see how we would do it better. What we’re doing is sending ourselves back in time and replacing their shoes with our own. They didn’t know what you know and you have no idea what they knew.

A potentially effective approach is to introduce an immutable decision log. We have these people in many other fields - they record the decisions made and they become part of the overall reasoning.

I reckon anyone in a position of power should have an independent decision log. Tech architects, CTOs...