Not to speak for someone else, but the last sentence was clearly a reference to "The beatings will continue, until morale improves."

You're right though. And it's a balance between technical debt incurred having not enough time (hacky shortcuts) vs technical debt incurred from having full freedom (overengineering of unnecessary layered abstractions and indirection).

It's a tightrope and we're always going to stumble somehow. In retrospect, we tend to focus on the stumbles (wouldn't do that now!) rather than the fact that we actually got across the canyon and delivered business value. A natural bias - we discount the fact that we're making new mistakes even as we look back and criticize our past mistakes.