This is why I refer to it as Technical Tax. Your technical tax bracket is proportional to the amount of cruft and bitrot in the system. A technical tax bracket of 100% means every last bit of development effort is expended on simply maintaining the status quo. So, efforts to lower technical tax bracket can come from refactors, and cleanups, but also from introducing new technologies that diminish current limitations unlocking new capabilities.
Everyone pays bills, so there is no abstratcion.
Teams prefer to keep it constant and portitonal to the utility of the structure standing and building.
Every so often it goes up and phoning it "in" to the company to pick up discounts.
If the bill is unchecked, eventually it will sap away all of the monthly expentiure.
When the rate is unmanageable, the team members look at each other in disbelief.