A bad hire can set everything back significantly more. Not only do you have to deal with new missed deadlines or poor quality work, but you often have to deal with the fallout with team members. Plus you're using up a lot of management/leadership hours dealing with it.
The impact is even more important the more senior the role. Hiring a bad manager or lead can impact way more than hiring a bad fresh-out-of-school grad.
The final straw was during a meeting when it was brought up that they were using take home projects to evaluate candidates. We're drowning in work and you're delaying us adding resources AND wasting bandwidth on take home projects? Not to mention wasting that candidates time and contributing to the "all hours" mentality that made the job miserable for me to work in.