I feel like it depends on the project.

Typically in the ones I work on, whenever I spot an inconsistency I fix it no matter how much of a mess that causes. Yes it hurts at first, but it may hurt more down the line when the weirdnesses accumulate to the point where it impacts operations and it'll be a much bigger problem to fix.

However, I can totally see a more chill strategy work better for a project that is mostly just relatively simple code, like perhaps some website deployments. In my opinion it depends a lot on whether the code is generally already complicated, which is when you'll typically want to refactor earlier than later.