I think a much more thorough and measured discussion of this was done by Gwern in his piece about socks https://www.gwern.net/Socks https://www.gwern.net/Socks

I think a much more thorough and measured discussion of this was done by Gwern in his piece about socks https://www.gwern.net/Socks https://www.gwern.net/Socks in which he describes yak shaving as a failure cascade and talks about ways to avoid it.