Whack a mole can be a highly successful strategy if there is a cost to having the mole appear somewhere else and the whacker has more resources than the one controlling the mole.
Successful does not imply sustainable. There is an argument to be made for doing manual strategies like whack-a-mole until you have a generic solution, but if you don't have the generic solution coming down the pike, it's time to go back to the drawing board.