> This is a false dichotomy, and there is plenty of research (and experience) that shows shipping higher quality software actually takes less time and money.

I believe you when the business knows exactly what it's building. In the context of the article and the comment I was responding to, building high quality software wouldn't have helped them early on, thats kinda the whole point of tech debt and the discussion here. Knowing when is the right time to start changing the engineering culture and how easy (or hard) it is to do that.