I've seen "Penetrate and Patch" play out a lot on software development in general. When a new requirement shows up, or technical debt starts to grow, or performance issues, the first instinct of a lot of people is to try and find the smallest, easiest possible change to achieve the immediate goal, and just move to the next user story.

That's not a bad instinct by itself, but when it's your only approach, it leads to a snowball of problems. Sometimes you have to question the assumptions, to take a step back and try to redesign things, or new addition just won't fit, and the system just become wonkier and wonkier.