It's a horrible moniker for the concept and most people who use it don't really mean piecemeal growth at all. What they do talk about is usually design where some shortcut allows you to quickly accomplish a short-term goal while completely ignoring long-term consequences. This is the mentality that I see everywhere in the software industry today.

Go is mentioned here in comments as an example of "worse is better". It fits nicely. The main "feature" of the language is that it doesn't have any constructs that would require an average college grad or a disgruntled Java shitcoder out there to apply effort in order to understand the feature. Thus, people grab the language and mindlessly run with it. By the time the codebase grows where you need more advanced features, it's too late to switch.

My prediction is that in a few years when an average Go codebase switches ownership at least once, it will become widely hated, and language developers will start cramming in features that they originally said aren't needed there at all. You've already seen a preview of thing when they replaced cutesey (and obviously broken) dependency management with modules.