What looks like "wasting time on procrastination" may be actually "spending time on thinking". Thinking takes time.

Making messy edits is a bet on previous code quality. If you have paid off enough technical debt, you can take another "technical loan" and expect the rest of the owl to still function despite the mess being introduced. If things are already messy, there's always a risk to make the fess incomprehensible and failing in mysterious seemingly unrelated ways, with the only way to fix it being to git reset --hard to the prior point, and do a more right thing. But the time would have been wasted already.

My approach is usually to timebox it, and cut the losses if an acceptable solution is not yet in sight when the time runs out.