Taking the shortest path to achieve a goal often seems like the good idea, but it leads to bloat and inefficiency. It'd take longer to "do it right" so you never do it right.
But you ignore the fact that all that bloat actually costs you to maintain it. "Not fixing it" is always faster and will always be the shortest path to the next feature... but that next feature gets harder and harder to achieve as the bloat grows. The bloat makes the fastest thing slower and slower while the fastest thing is always ignoring the bloat.
When you appropriately choose when to fix, when to focus on efficiency, everything becomes faster.
The concept is slowing down to move faster.
There's avoiding premature optimization and then there's ignoring optimization forever except for extreme emergencies.