From my very limited experience with art, it's more often the case that a work in progress creation is abandoned and then taken a stab at anew later than trashed and restarted. Or it is iterated on to a degree that it is not meaningfully different from a full restart.
I have a bit more experience with software and the only reason for why we don't plan throw one away is because it costs more money and the market pressure on software quality is too low to make stakeholders care. In my personal hobby coding, I often practice this (or do what I described above with art which is closer to abandoning until inspiration strikes again at which point a blank slate is more inviting). The closest thing professionally I get is a "spike" where I explore something via code with the output not being the code itself, but the knowledge attained which then becomes an input to new code writing.
I have a bit more experience with software and the only reason for why we don't plan throw one away is because it costs more money and the market pressure on software quality is too low to make stakeholders care. In my personal hobby coding, I often practice this (or do what I described above with art which is closer to abandoning until inspiration strikes again at which point a blank slate is more inviting). The closest thing professionally I get is a "spike" where I explore something via code with the output not being the code itself, but the knowledge attained which then becomes an input to new code writing.