It is a matter of mindset. I work on software with soft real time, storage capacity and power consumption constrains, there is a constant flux of "small" feature requests and I cannot even "throw hardware at the problem" at will like as they apparently did, until it became unquestionable that the problem had to be fixed properly.

I'd recommend to adopt this mindset even if one doesn't have those constrains - without erring on the side of "faster than necessary" though - because it's usually difficult to assess how much time and money are leaking because of the inefficiencies one accepts in the name of questionable reasons. They were sort of lucky to have a bill to show it to them.

A proactive stance in this regard goes a long way.