10 years is a long time, and a lot can happen in that time. In 2017 there was an administration in the White House that was quite hostile to public infrastructure projects and withheld all the federal funding the previous administration had promised. For all we know there will be another administration like that in 2 or 6 years which does the same (or even more) to sabotage the project.
In 2018 a new CEO took over the project and took a hard policy against over promising. This is when we saw the initial operating segment being scaled back to only include Bakerfield to Merced by the end of this decade. Since then we’ve actually seen a lot truer projections which have come true. For example Construction Package 4 is almost complete and pretty much on time and on budget.