Do you think that is only a problem in government? Fads are a fundamental part of human nature.

In tech, we have many examples: Agile, Ruby on Rails, React, RISC, OOP, microservices, and so on and so on. All have some real benefits, but also have or have had huge hype cycles.

You can make the same argument for most other industries (if not all of them). And then there are things like diets, religions, etc.