If that is something that has to be done a couple of times in a projects whole life, fine. If that is how bugs are solved all the time or frequently, I can only imagine how bad the codebase will be to maintain in years, and how depressing a job it must be to work on it.

That line of thought bleeds that no-one cares about the project, and only cares that the "people paying for it" hopefully don't notice the state of affairs underneath, and that they are not in a position to switch away from the product when ultimately it burns, which it will, if that is how bugs are treated. It bleeds that money is the only incentive, not heart, not passion, and that's just sad. It's why so much software is so bad and ends up costing much more in the long run than fixing the damn bugs properly right now, either because you end up having to maintain it until death, because it's so hard to maintain, or because you can't keep increasing customers after years because the product is now in such a bad state that time is spend fixing/hiding bugs instead of adding new features or improving existing ones.

> ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs.

That is true for most people and most projects, unfortunately. Bugs should not be covered and hidden away, they should be fixed.