I've only ever been involved in something close to that "tech debt default" in my career. All other cases of throwing something out were either planned to begin with (so intentionally a throwaway prototype, not tech debt), or just giving up on the product (tech debt included, but who cares at that point).
(the case I was in was the game Commandos. We completely threw away all source code for the sequel, which we wrote from scratch with different architecture, tech and even somewhat different coding standards. Getting rid of the tech debt that Commandos accumulated over the yearlong deathmarch was nice, but without the completely different architecture needs I doubt it would have happened)
(the case I was in was the game Commandos. We completely threw away all source code for the sequel, which we wrote from scratch with different architecture, tech and even somewhat different coding standards. Getting rid of the tech debt that Commandos accumulated over the yearlong deathmarch was nice, but without the completely different architecture needs I doubt it would have happened)