It's important to look at this in context of history. A lot of what came about today started under the Strategic Computing Initiative (link below). It was a massive investment over a period of time that threw money at every smart person or neat idea you could think of hoping for scientific equivalent of moonshots. We got a bunch of them, too, so it worked imho. Thinking Machines explored the novel concept of massively parallel CPU's with languages & work distribution modified for them. Supercomputers of time had fewer, less-radical cores. Projects like Thinking Machines led to Massively-Parallel Processing architectures that combined hundreds to thousands of more-typical CPU's, custom interconnects, and special tools for programming. My favorite of those were Distributed, Shared-Memory (DSM) machines. Later, Beowulf clusters were invested to use commodity CPU's, boards, and networking to bring cost down. High-performance interconnects improved and got cheaper simultaneously. These trends led to commodity clusters from startups and semi-custom clusters from IBM (esp SP2), Cray, SGI, etc.

The reason for doing something so different & risky like Thinking Machines Corp is to try to create those ripple effects. Well, build and dominate a market is number 1 but government funders trying to get ahead wanted ripples as a backup. They got it, too. Also, the machine could pull off amazing stuff [1] with its architecture. Similar one's using 8-bitters piled into a chip were used for neural networks. One could probably re-created benefits of Thinking Machines same way for the problems that suited it.

[1] http://kk.org/mt-files/outofcontrol/ch15-d.html

https://monoskop.org/images/d/d4/Roland_Alex_Shiman_Philip_S...

Note: The book is well-worth skimming through given how it documents how modern computing practices formed. I had never heard of SCI. I thought the stuff was unrelated but turns out it was all connected. Documents lots of attempts, justifications, policy effects, etc. Gold mine.