Tangentially, Taleb tweeted a nice quote yesterday, "You don't do well by trying to be right; it is impossible for humans. You do well by figuring out when you're wrong faster than others do."
There's value in shipping an MVP (or multiple MVPs) fast, sure. Cull the failures and iterate the successes. Better than trying to achieve perfection with a forever-delayed product that never ships.
But even the sloppiest, most minimal MVP has to get something extremely right. You need to solve some problem for the user in ways that others haven't.
If you don't get things right enough, you've just trashed your entire brand. Game over.
And sometimes, getting things "right" is literally your entire unique selling point. Look at Apple nailing the iPod's features in ways that its predecessors didn't. Look at Tesla nailing their vehicles' features in ways that its predecessors didn't. Etc.
both Apple and Tesla have had plenty of failures to learn from -- and they recovered remarkably.
There isn't much reason to believe that the parents' quote is at-odds with the operation of either of those two companies.
Tesla, on the other hand, is a great example -- they're willing, even enthusiastic, about killing their customers as learning experience.
I used to do the opposite: write high-quality well-tested code, but very often the results weren't useful to the business by the time I was done. It would have been much better to produce a couple "sketches" of the feature first, then the business could kill or refine it as they want. Everyone wins!
(disclaimer: writing a book, featuring feedback loops)