> the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical

If you go back far enough to the time when and one-offs and all programs were written from scratch, I doubt that. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...:

“the programmer himself had a very modest view of his own work: his work derived all its significance from the existence of that wonderful machine. Because that was a unique machine, he knew only too well that his programs had only local significance and also, because it was patently obvious that this machine would have a limited lifetime, he knew that very little of his work would have a lasting value”

I think technical debt started to be somewhat of an issue somewhere in the early 1970s, maybe a few years earlier.