Developers as Stakeholders

In order to get developer-driven issues addressing technical and architectural debt prioritized for attention

Prioritized for whose attention? The Product Owner represents stakeholders, but doesn’t a Scrum Development Team have the PO’s attention anyway?

I'm not sure why developers wouldn't be considered stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone, whether it's a person or a group or an organization, with an interest in a product or project. Members of the development team have an interest in the product or process being developed.

I see two primary ways of prioritizing technical debt.

First, it can be implicit. That is, the development team (one or more members) has an internal knowledge of the technical debt of the system. This knowledge provides an input into their estimates of Product Backlog Items, and comes up through the refinement process. As technical debt accrues, the estimates for Product Backlog Items become larger and larger, until the team pays it down as part of completing the work.

Second, it can be explicit. The team can track specific pieces of work that can be done to pay down technical debt. This work can be tracked and linked as dependencies to other work on the Product Backlog. The idea is that if the dependent work is done, it will make other Product Backlog Items easier to accomplish with higher quality. If not done, there is a level of risk around schedule and quality.

Both can work, but it depends on your environment. There may even be other options. But the idea of not addressing technical debt somehow - either explicitly or implicitly - doesn't make much sense to me.