I don’t think you should be embarrassed or apologize. You still did a thing that improved performance - in the near term it worked around a bug that you weren’t even aware of, and long term there are still gains even with that bug fixed. But even if that weren’t the case, the only way anything gets done in software is to rely on abstractions. You can either get things done or know exactly how every last bit of your stack is implemented, but probably not both. It’s a very reasonable trade off.

Smart people go and build things. Other smart people find problems. Nothings broken with that.