Yeah, it was rarely that silly. Usual thing I'm thinking of are the designs where folks think they can make something like facebook messenger with 200ms latency in the system. You know, "by design." (Of course... I swear that was an interview question I was given once.)

What you wind up with is someone designing a giant system from parts they have read about that, honestly would probably work. However, it would also require retouching pretty much every system in the company to get things aligned. Which, isn't likely to ever happen.

Put a different way, the longer a project spends in design phase, the higher the chance it will not get completed. And all too often people will spend a ton of time in design looking for ways to make sure what they are building will scale to success level loads.