Comment by jancsika

Somewhat related-- I remember tracking a bug to a poorly documented commit in a codebase. The dev had changed the memory allocation routine to multiply the requested size by 8 in order to fix "a crasher."

Removing that "fix" immediately triggered a series of crashers that led like breadcrumbs to the part of the code which contained the actual bugs being papered over.

Instead of Chesterton's fence, this is something like "Chad's bandaid." If you immediately strip these away the real problems stick out like a sore thumb and you can properly fix them.