I'm using that term from now on. :)

One project I worked on had almost a half dozen "lava flows" in the JavaScript alone... I had a hard time convincing folks we could rewrite it using ASTs because all the rewrites scared folks away from any further rewrites!

The best (well, worst, really) part is when it ends in a state where the parts are almost right, but not quite. The result is, quote one of my coworkers, "We ended up with the architecture that is so flexible that we can't change a single bloody thing in it! What the hell!" The whole is flexible, but this flexibility is pointless: you can make the parts behave differently, but there is only one behaviour that is actually useful; you can combine things together differently, but there are at most two combinations that do things in a useful way; etc.

I've seen that applied to long running legacy projects. This is how they did things back in 2008. Here someone discovered an orm library. Now here, they started to try to introduce some microservice event driven architectural pattern that was all the rage in the blogs that year....