Coming from an art background, I tend to think of those as Cubist in nature, like a Picasso painting. You see just one roof, but from many different perspectives, making it look like many roofs.
You've reminded me that "Old Stormwind" in World of Warcraft had the opposite of that: in order to give a sense of scale from ground level, the 3D model for a building would have different roofs visible from street level pretending to be one roof. It had to be redone when players could fly.
I like the Picasso reference. The line between art and "a bunch of crap put together" is sometime difficult to pin down. And it takes a Picasso to navigate that boundary without stepping over.
Cascading gables are totally Cubist in nature. It's a gable partly obscured by a smaller version of itself! And a gable is itself sort of a simplified outline of a house plastered onto an actual house.