While I think your tone is a bit more critical than it needs to be, as many very intelligent people have made the same mistake, I think the sentiment is correct. But 'standing up to management' is literally not possible if they don't want it to be. They get to make the decisions if they want to, more or less by definition of 'management'. He did say 'we need to bail' to his boss at one point.

But, essentially, your final paragraph's point is the bottom line. This was not fundamentally a tech problem, it was a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen problem. That's a business decision.