And this is what a lot of developers do: copying superficial patterns without understanding. It used to be junior (and not so junior) programmers using unnecessarily complex design patterns without understanding what problems they were about to solve. Then it was building systems out of dozens of services to be able to scale, because they didn't have any idea of what kind of scale they actually needed more than one cpu for.
That's how cargo cults start. They way they are propagated, though (in tech), is when devs become old enough to become "senior" without yet having grasped how and when to use patterns, and then proceed to teach them to juniors as mystical, holy imperatives that must be repeated without questioning.
Plenty of businesses have a life cycle like this:
1. A group of devs strike on some effective patterns through some combination of luck and deep insight.
2. Juniors get hired and are taught the patterns, but not the WHY of the patterns.
3. The founders leave, and the first hires become the leads.
4. The business has now lost the ability to create anything innovative, as everyone are now slaves to the original patterns.
5. Gradually the business loses the ability to recreate even the original patterns, as some details are lost every time they are handed over.
