> As someone who has been programming for about 25 years now and has always been frustrated by the tendency of software devs, and in particular web devs, to not address the root issues but just scaffold on top of them and try to hide the ugly bits under the carpet, I feel a bit vindicated.

Your analysis is severely flawed and naive.

Software devs often patch and sidestep the root issues for the same reason why every single engineering field resorts to patching ans sidestepping root issues.

Why do you think there is such a thing as aviation duct tape? This is a field where people's lives are on the line.

There is a very puerile belief around opinionated junior devs which an inconvenience in the code justifies redesigning whole systems, even if they are still quite capable of performing their functions. Things need to be clean and ideally elegant, and any minor deviation is cause to tear everything down and start over.

In the meantime, experienced and competent engineers instead get the system back in working order and downgrade the criticality of existing issues until it's convenient to address them.

Go ask a project manager if all bugs should block a release, or if it is ok to release something with a known bug. Listen to them. Perhaps then you'll understand why patching works.