The decision to re-use the component as-is in the Ariane 5 without sufficiently investigating the consequences of the higher horizontal velocities that it is subject to compared to the Ariane 4 cannot so obviously be blamed on the programmer that implemented it years before in a different context.
I kind of took the story as an allegory when writing my comment. The article is quite vague about the details of the situation. And for all I know, it IS programmers that write specs for this European Space Agency unmanned rocket project. But the way the story is told aligns with a more universal experience of programmers blaming specs for the failings of programs, even when they should have recognized that the program was misspecified before implementing it. I ran with that interpretation because it was illustrative of something important, but it is not particularly surprising to me that the details are being questioned. The article was never a rock solid account.