Maybe that's the best solution for the long run, instead of designing and implementing a whole garbage disposal system from the ground up for only one piece of trash.
My problem a lot of software developers are trying to solve problems they don't have and never will. This consumes time and adds unnecessary complexity to their projects.
I've seen this many times: programmer is asked to solve a small and well defined problem. Instead programmer generalizes it and makes something more universal with the requested feature as a special case. More often than not nothing except this special case is used.
Or working on some new project they add a feature which looks useful in theory, but ends up being rarely/never used. It may look easy to implement initially, but over the years maintenance cost can be much higher.
I guess it's called experience to know when to design and when to just implement. Somebody wrote somewhere for example that if you're not going to need a particular piece of code in more than 3 different places, don't write a function for it.
As a newbie you would totally want to write a function for it, thus also making it harder to read the code as you would have to understand the function in order to see what it does in that context.
Also thinking in terms of "Do I really need this feature in future use cases?" is something I don't feel you can assess when not having the experience of already have peeked into those future use cases, where in many cases you will not ever need that particular function in more than this one place.
But can you learn how to design a reusable system without first doing it in the wrong places ? That's something that is hard to say, I don't know.
Could you teach somebody who wants to build complex, reusable components not to do it and just stick to simplicity ? How would one then know how to build those reusable systems where you need them ?
Maybe we should focus more on training both simplicity and complex design, but rarely you can do that when you are under pressure and working on real life software.