I can't help but think that much of the intent behind "cargo-culting" is simply people building up their resumes for future career development.

If you want to work in a sexy new technology, but you need to develop experience in that new stuff to be marketable it is totally understandable to try to build up skills by forcing the implementation of over-sized solutions.

In other words, many employers aren't willing to take on folks if they don't have the requisite experience on some new stack and that compels folks to gain that experience anyway they can, including "cargo-culting" stuff that isn't necessary just for the experience gain.