What the author describes isn't really the kind of yak shaving I find myself doing as a programmer. Yes, fixing a bug in a single dedicated pull request is one

What the author describes isn't really the kind of yak shaving I find myself doing as a programmer. Yes, fixing a bug in a single dedicated pull request is one technique that can be helpful in a very specific situation. But it's as if in the apple pie situation, the author said that the way to avoid yak shaving is to always have prebaked apple pies in your fridge. One quickly discovers how bad yak shaving can get when they go to store the apple pies in their fridge and find out that the fridge is full. Or when they go to open a pull request and realize that the CI tests aren't running because their credit card has expired and they can't update the card info because the person with access to that information is on PTO, and they spend the day trying to resolve the billing issue instead of just making a simple pull request to fix the bug.