How is your position distinct from, "I don't understand X, ergo X can't be very important"? Because it looks pretty much the same to me.
If you think each business is a "random attempt", I hope you're never a founder. Modern businesses are highly non-random. It's true that investing in startups is in some sense gambling, but it's gambling on a highly filtered subset of all existing businesses, which is in turn a tiny fraction of all possible businesses.
The "where is the data" line is especially misleading here because no data just means no data. There are no high-n, double-blind studies validating the concept of technical debt. But there are also no studies demonstrating it's not a useful concept. And that's most of life: the decisions we have to make rarely can be solved by looking up journal studies. When that's the case, we have to apply other tools.
Again, I see this as you mistaking "I don't understand" for "there is nothing there". I obviously don't think it's handwaving, and it has been a long time since I took unsupported accusations from Internet randoms very seriously.
Sure, you could be a very special snowflake, so smart that the world really does always break down into "obvious to brobdignagian" and "dumb/meaningless". But if you're that smart then I'd suggest that either a) you should use your smarts to make your Olympian view comprehensible to us mortals, or b) you're wasting your time talking with the likes of us.
If you think each business is a "random attempt", I hope you're never a founder. Modern businesses are highly non-random. It's true that investing in startups is in some sense gambling, but it's gambling on a highly filtered subset of all existing businesses, which is in turn a tiny fraction of all possible businesses.
The "where is the data" line is especially misleading here because no data just means no data. There are no high-n, double-blind studies validating the concept of technical debt. But there are also no studies demonstrating it's not a useful concept. And that's most of life: the decisions we have to make rarely can be solved by looking up journal studies. When that's the case, we have to apply other tools.