The XY approach can be perfectly legitimate. You're a domain expert. You have a problem X. It's a standard problem in your domain but only you can really understand it. However, you can see that a general purpose approach, Y, could solve it. Y might even sound complicated but is at least fully explainable whereas X isn't easily explainable at all.

Of course, the "XY problem" usually presumes a naive person ("user")who falsely imagines the more complicated-sounding solution Y would solve their simple problem. And that's a pretty common situation.

The general approach for all this stuff is whenever someone is asking for the solution to a complicated or weird question, just verify they have some reason to approach it that way. There's no reason to automatically assume either they do or they don't and not assuming anything lets you approach them more respectfully.