We have a saying for that in Greek: Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού

"Nothing more permanent than the temporary"

In Norwegian we have the (made up, but widespread) word 'Permasorisk' (a mangling of permanent and provisorisk) to describe a solution which is by no means meant to be permanent, but solves the original problem well enough that there no longer is a need for the permanent solution...

It was never a temporary 'fix'. The product eventually spun off into a new company and was recently acquired by a PE firm.

But yeah, creating software - or any kind of process actually - results in maintenance. If something is used a lot -> too many people depend on it. If the number of consumers/users isn't documented -> you don't know if you can turn it off, but for this problem you can inspect a year's worth of log files :)