Many of an engineering bent, including programmers / coders / developers / whatever we’re called this week, have an innate desire to tinker with things and add “just one more feature”. This is known as “feature creep” as more and more metaphorical little bells and whistles are added. See also: “Bells and whistles” itself, “creeping featurism”, “feeping creatures” (ho-ho), and variants thereof.
Searching some of those actually finds other terms that other responders have mentioned.
Most of my stuff over the years has been hobby or job-adjacent rather than my actual job to produce the tools I did, so I think what really helped me to stop working on the very few things that were requested by other people was not being a user of the tool I created.
I still had to “use” things to test them, but once they were in real use, I didn’t have to see them all the time and think “I could just add this little thing here / there / etc.”
It was only at the request of the users that specific new features were added.
Getting someone else to design the interface is often helpful, assuming they’re not an absolute fool.
A few years later, a very similar tool I made, one that I was a user of, got a lot more tinkering and feature churn. Maintaining backwards compatibility reigned some of that in, but there were a couple of times where that wasn’t possible.
It doesn’t help that some of the duplicates aren’t duplicates at all but some SO admin or mod hasn’t read or understood the question properly and points the asker at something that’s actually only vaguely related or irrelevant.
I’m pretty sure I’ve also heard of askers providing links to other questions that are similar to but not quite what they’re interested in, explained why their question is different and yet it’s one of those linked questions that ends up being identified as being identical to the asker’s question.
There may also be at least one pair of questions that each point back at the other as being the original, and there’s no useful information in either. (I don’t know why this idea is in my head though, so maybe it was a joke I read somewhere.)
Either way, the admins and mods there do not like to be told they are wrong and will shut things down fast if it starts looking like they’ve made a mistake. Unfortunately for them, stories like this get out anyway.
Petty little overlords of the toxic waste dump of their own making.