You refer to "Technical Debt".

We all accrue technical debt in the products we develop over time, refactoring is one of the very common and effective ways of reducing this technical debt, though many companies never pay down their technical debt. These companies tend to find their software extremely unstable years down the road, and the technical debt becomes so gruesome that you can't pay it down incrementally because it would take too long to pay it down that way.

Technical debt has the term because it follows the same behaviours of debt. You get the debt, and as long as you continue spending (creating features) and not paying down that debt, it'll only grow. Much like debt, when it get's too large you get to points where you may wish to shed it entirely with dangerous tasks like full-out rewrites. Also like real debt, as it accrues to a certain point, it hinders your ability to spend (creating features) altogether.