I completely get where this person is coming from. The distinction between maintenance and producing new features on one side and paying down technical is so strange. It does not make very much sense to start working on a piece of the code that is hardly every touched and that has been working for years to improve it. What one should be doing instead is to make sure that the work one is doing for the purpose of maintenance and creating new features leaves the code base in a better state than it was found in. If one does that it becomes mostly unnecessary to talk about technical debt.

I do think technical debt does exist, though. Sometimes the changes that one wants to do are a bit too big to do right now and one should make a plan to get them done eventually and in small pieces wherever possible. This is called having architectural goals. One should try to be in this situation as little as possible, though.