Right, E.T isn't a stand out classic, it's a bit rushed, the game isn't a great fit to the movie (but it's far from the worst in that era), but what stands out in people's memories is mostly that it wasn't what they expected. Which somewhat tells us about that era of video games more than about ET.
In an era with Goose Game, Paper's Please and Unpacking, people understand that just because this is a video game doesn't mean it needs to fit into a handful of pre-existing niches - games can do whatever they want, but ET pre-dates that era.
I expect if you had shot a found footage mockumentary movie in 1940 (before even Citizen Kane was shown) audiences wouldn't even have understood what you were trying to do. It wouldn't matter whether you did a good job or not, reviews are going to say it's a bad movie because the reviewer does not have a framework in which to assess it.
From the account in the linked article, it seems that a large part of the blame can be laid at the feet of the licensing folks at WB, who ate up a ton of the development time by constantly demanding changes. They probably didn't lose their jobs.