Is there a name for the opposite of a yak-shave? Some sort of deep, tortuous side quest that's necessary for getting to the main objective, but you DON'T want to do and want to give up on main project to avoid?
So I looked up the history of "Yak Shaving". It's inspired by Ren & Stimpy's "Yak Shaving Day" https://youtube.com/watch?v=5mmISldi060… but only indirectly. Carl Yervin at MIT was talking about the concept, watched the show, and thought it seemed apt for the last step.
For yak-shaving exercise, the digressions tend to get increasingly absurd. You start out updating sendmail, and end up looking for a serial cable <-> USB-C connector. But for these show stoppers it's the opposite, the blockers are ugly, artificial, and/or bureaucratic.