This is evidently a controversial take: if your projects are always delayed, maybe systematically track the things that slow you down and fix them?

In practice, this means instead of working around tech debt, you pay it down prior to working on it. It's faster than slogging through the same problems over and over. The key is you need to measure and focus on the ACTUAL things that slow you down. Lose a day to flakey tests? Fix the damn tests.

Eliminating the slow things is THE way to go fast - it's so obvious but very few teams actually do this. Instead they complain about all the problems and tech debt then act surprised when, lo and behold, those obstacles once again get in the way of progress. It's embarrassing to see a backlog of "these things slow down development!" tickets get systematically ignored as an explanatory factor, in favor of folk theories and politics.