It’s mostly a software development term. Bugs are the most obvious kind of tech debt. They have to be fixed or a product will slowly become unusable over time, so when you release something with bugs you’re incurring “debt” they must be “paid” later by fixing them. A lot of tech debt also involves corner cutting and bad design decisions that are hard to explain briefly.

I’m pretty sure Mercurial is newer than git, or at least from the same generation.

I swear to God sometimes git just conjures merge conflicts out of nothing.

God, I remember the backspace thing. I hope whoever allowed a computer to be shipped in that condition got fired.