Yeah, cowboy coding as a strategy makes most sense if it's very likely that the next person to look at the code will be you.

I'm not advocating either way as superior, but cowboy coding shouldn't mean that you don't pay your tech debt. It just means that it's much more common to roll a bug fix or small factoring improvement in with a feature, probably because you were already touching that code and testing it.

If prod bugs are so critical that there will be a rollback and a forensic retrospective on each one, then yeah you should bite the bullet and use all the most defensive PR tactics. If prod bugs have small costs and you can quickly "roll forwards" (ship fixes) then it's better to get some free QA from your users, who probably won't mind the occasional rough edge if they're confident that overall quality is OK and bugs they do find won't stay unfixed for years.