The thing nobody wants to pay for - documentation

Lack of documentation is bad. Incorrect documentation is much worse and they may well cost (typically: OTHER people) more than "just" fixing it. So there is an "interest" element; fair enough. All the more reason to treat documentation as code BTW, thank you Sphinx and other markdown languages.

However I've don't remember the lack of documentation ever being named a "hack" and I've never seen it "laying the grounds" for more "hacks" either. So I still think it's a stretch. Everyone is of course free to use their own terminology; in fact we're constantly drowning under cryptonyms and other technical jargon. But the more "diverse" and fragmented terminology is and the less efficient is communication.

Wait... maybe we could call these language inconsistencies... technical debt? :-D Documentation is just a special case of communication after all.