I believe you should have read the article. It discusses $30 million in lost sales due to the packaging redesign. It was not talking about the costs to do the redesign.
“It” here is the title, which is not talking about the cost to implement the redesign, only the lost sales. That the cost to implement the redesign is mentioned in one sentence, within an article devoted to explaining why the redesign failed, does not keep the top-level comment from being misaimed. Its clear the commenter is responding to a mistaken belief about the topic of the article (which he says he didnt read).
"But why did it fail? How does a $35 million rebranding project fail?"