I refer you to Mark-Jason Dominus's original explanation of what X and Y had to be. It got renamed "XY Problem" after the fact, and that name didn't take off for a long time, really not until Stack Overflow appeared and became popular, well over a decade after MJD posted about this and well after many of us had for that time not been calling it this on volunteer-support mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...

On Stackoverflow in particular, there is also a ~YY answer. You explain that you specifically don't want Y, then someone tells you you are wrong and to simply use Y.

Might as well just call this the "Stackoverflow problem", although it is really a family of problems where either the requestor or (typically) the responses are less than helpful.

As a third party searcher looking for answers to a specific problem, I would prefer to see a direct solution to the stated question first, even if it is followed by admonitions that "you probably don't want to do that" or "this other thing is a better approach".

Well, yes, but many of the times people on SO say they don't want to use Y, it's because of some assumptions they have about Y, and actually they do want to use Y, or use it differently than usual etc.