[svnt]

Yes but here the author mixes tool-making and product de-risking. I was talking about tool-making which seemed to be the unique part of the article. Everyone designing hardware products designs some hardware.

You can almost always make tools and test equipment with general-purpose hardware. There are companies that design hardware intended to be used like that. People tend to (understandably) try to drag problems into domains where they are comfortable solving them. In this case they tended to draw solutions from hardware but a software team probably would have solved them a different way.