It's easier to be wrong.
In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs.
They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues.
They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project.
> It was not viable. Unacceptable.
The option that they suggested, letting the project slip, was a significantly more viable option than what they actually took.
Re-evaluating the requirements and coming up with a viable subset of deliverables would also have been a sane choice.
But since the company had no intention of letting the client know they were having trouble, sane solutions were banned from the table.