I've seen it happen and it's usually just Normalization of Deviance in an organization that is focusing on something else. Someone needs some kind of functionality and Kube makes creating services trivial so they launch it into a different service[0]. Over time, while people are working on important things this thing occasionally has load issues so someone goes and bumps the maxReplicas up periodically. Eventually you come back to it a year later and maxReplicas is at 24 and you've removed the code paths for almost everything that is hitting the server except some inexplicable hot-loop.
Then you look at it and you're like "Jesus! What the fuck, I meant to have this be a stop-gap". I've done as bad when at near 100% duty-cycle. Often you're targeting just the primary thing that's blocking some revenue and if you get caught yak-shaving you're screwed. A year ago, I did one of these things because I was in the middle of two projects that were blocking a potential hundred-million in revenue.
A year down the line, Claude Opus 4.6 could have live-solved it. But Claude of that time would have required some time and attention and I was doing something else.
That engineering team is some 15 people strong and the company is at $400m+ revenue. If you saw the code, you'd wonder why anyone would have done something like this.
0: I once did this because some inscrutable code/library was tying us to an old runtime so I just encapsulated it in HTTP and moved it into a service.