I would call it Scapegoat Engineering, but yes, it is a phenomenon that I've seen. However, people are not as susceptible to it as you may think. I see it happen more when the group doesn't understand the scapegoat well. For instance, a language, framework, API, etc is painted as the scapegoat. Then, it's harder to refute, when in reality the group was holding/using it wrongly due to lack of experience.