Although since most businesses have long ago slashed their R&D for short term stock gains, it makes sense from a corporate american perspective despite being naive.
Is it conceptually different than saying "I lost 10K this year; I put 10k in a 2-year treasury note."
(That is a really interesting "strategic partnership" to watch right now. Early previews suggest the Ford Explorer may be the best use of the MEB platform to date, and Ford using the Explorer badge on it may be the sign that they expect to sell a lot of them.)
The Mach-E and F150 architectures were stop-gaps, and pretty good at that.
* One, it still is not completely clean sheet, and thus has a lot of unnecessary complexity in wiring and body parts - which pushes up unit costs.
* Two, it's a 400V architecture that really doesn't like a lot of electrons flowing through it all at once. As a result it throttles charging speeds and acceleration pretty brutally.
* Yet, weirdly, Ford's electronics are quite a bit better than VW. No one is at Tesla levels, but VW's electronics is just bad. Quite a few YouTube reviewers have detailed this.
In-car infotainment and things like that? Yeah, VW has an interesting reputation from their "experiments" and failures across the ID line. That was definitely one of the reasons that early previews think that Ford's Explorer may potentially out-sell VW's own MEB efforts if for no other reason than because the in-car non-battery electronics are Ford's sleeker, more battle-tested things. (VW is certainly looking to improve things in the near term, they've been in the process of moving out of "experiments" and towards Android Automotive.)
But also, VW's ID.4 especially is notorious for having one of the worst ever designed, which is definitely saying something.