Definitely a legitimate consideration. There's always a balance between exploring and exploiting, with an equilibrium point somewhere. My experience is biased by many situations where exploration was unduly limited.
Or was just not done in good faith. Which is why having a culture of openness and honesty and acceptance of failure (to an extent) is important to building an effective engineering culture.
Agreed, and in the author's instance that makes sense but generalizing the problems faced in a specific region that is known for not-so-great government to engineering as a whole is ignoring a lot of context to decision-making, good or bad.
Or was just not done in good faith. Which is why having a culture of openness and honesty and acceptance of failure (to an extent) is important to building an effective engineering culture.