Technical debt can absolutely kill a company if you have competitors who are fast-following while already knowing where the map will lead them. They have a chance to avoid some of the problems.
I would suggest this isn't addressed in post-mortems because most of the time customers won't or can't tell you why they chose a competitor, sales doesn't know or doesn't communicate that to engineering, or engineering is too dysfunctional to act on the information and has a vested interest in justifying their own decisions.
Sometimes it isn't even tech debt per-se, just bad decisions that make implementation of critical features much more expensive... sometimes so expensive everyone feels it would take too long to implement so it isn't done.
I would suggest this isn't addressed in post-mortems because most of the time customers won't or can't tell you why they chose a competitor, sales doesn't know or doesn't communicate that to engineering, or engineering is too dysfunctional to act on the information and has a vested interest in justifying their own decisions.
Sometimes it isn't even tech debt per-se, just bad decisions that make implementation of critical features much more expensive... sometimes so expensive everyone feels it would take too long to implement so it isn't done.