Have you ever started to work on a task and suddenly you realized that said task requires some other little task(s) to be finished beforehand. Th...
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Being young and poor (a long time ago - now I'm old and poor) I decided I would change the clutch on my car all by myself. This was covered in chapter 3 of the maintenance manual and it was only 3 pages long. I decided an hour or two would probably be okay. On Saturday morning I had a leisurely breakfast, got my tools out, opened chapter 3 and looked at the first step....
"Remove Engine and Gearbox as described in Chapters 1 & 2"
I think finding yourself in such "yak shaving" means there are some serious flaws with the infrastructure, design, or technical debt (your particular example). But I would agree that it is part of human nature to lose focus and instead of solving underlying or immediate problem, diverge onto bunch of smaller, possibly menial tasks.
For some reason this picture brings to mind words cohesion and coupling.
Sounds like something a perfectionist would do. This used to happen to me often until I realized that I was going too hard on myself.
A lot of big companies didn't start as secure or as well organized as they are today. They set out an MVP and built it with the most basic stuff they had at their disposal and built upon that as time went by.
It's not like you didn't know this already, it's just so easy to forget it. ;)