[vemv]

That seems entirely subjective. People may go fast for meeting a deadline, or for iterating as you suggest.

Trying to determine what people do is likely a futile discussion.

Finally, by writing decoupled, modular software, you are always free to reassemble it later (discarding/rewriting undesired parts), no matter when it was originally assembled.

[regularfry]

This is something that has actually been researched, so it's not accurate to say it's subjective. Higher release rates (i.e. an iterative approach) cause higher organisational performance. See Accelerate, by Forsgren et al.