I think that's probably correct in describing where you end up, but not any particular step along the way. It's one of those "the road to hell is paved with goo

I think that's probably correct in describing where you end up, but not any particular step along the way. It's one of those "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" situations. When you first modify the abstraction, it's nearly perfect. Just one tiny conditional and it's a perfectly suitable abstraction again. The problem is, when this process repeats itself, you slowly get to the point where any one client of the abstraction is only using a small fraction of it, but there was never a singular point where someone made a decision to use the abstraction when it was anything less than "almost perfect".