My problem with the entire technical debt metaphor is that the interest payments are invisible.
On an accounting sheet I can see my interest rate and how much I'm paying monthly and make decisions. With technical debt, it's all about people time, and people time is a sunk cost to your finance department.
I think this is close, but I'd go even further and say that the problem is that with real debt anyone can see the money in black and white, they require no special training to be able to understand real debt and read the numbers off an account summary. There's not much room for interpretation there.
With tech debt, you can ask several engineers and get very different answers about how much tech debt there is on a particular project. It's not well defined, subject to interpretation, and so doesn't fit well with management wanting quantify the objective value of doing something. I think this is the real reason it's often disregarded.
It requires a degree of trust from management to the engineers to properly address, and that trust can be abused. All sides are aware of this and I'm sure I'm not the only one that has used tech debt as an excuse for some minor padding here and there.
On an accounting sheet I can see my interest rate and how much I'm paying monthly and make decisions. With technical debt, it's all about people time, and people time is a sunk cost to your finance department.