Do you take it into account when working on an existing file/unit where you have to add new functionality, but it also might have technical debt?
If so how do you do this process?
i stopped using the term technical debt. 'technical debt', 'refactoring', etc are not helpful to product owners. if something is contained in an area youre never touching, its not really worth even tracking because making it better won't improve any business metrics. tickets get lost, better to throw a comment in the code if anyone starts touching it later. If new functionality requires code changes, then that's just part of the requirements for that functionality. If some bit of code is slowing you down, then its a first class ticket to speed up developers, with explicit numbers on hours saved.
at the end of the day, the business doesn't care about code quality, it cares about revenue/profit, so reframe any tech debt in those terms