> An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

And what if the leadership/culture just responds 'screw you do it anyway, you're really elite right? You can do anything right?'. So the employees in the trench just goes on a death march because hey, passion and whatever.

And then at the postmortem leadership just plays the blame game for the broken product. Which is fine if you don't care about politicking, but now someone upside is convinced you suck and the layoffs come for you. In the author's case there seems to be even some sort of reputational harm. THIS is how the worker gets incredibly jaded.