Yeah I dunno, I hear this a lot, but there has universally been way more work to do than people to do it at every company I've worked for. But that doesn't mean the right things are being prioritized.
If we had a smaller and more competent team, the initial build might have been marginally slower, but we wouldn’t have to spend a permanent 50% to just keeping down the technical debt.
Is cost efficiency an effective perspective for innovation or revenue growth? Mostly, no. As long as your risk-of-ruin is low, then you want to fail. Sometimes people misinterpret this as “doing the wrong thing”. But it takes doing a lot of wrong things to do the right thing.
The difference between right and wrong, if there ever was such a simple dichotomy, is so marginal and only understood in hindsight.
Ultimately you end up in the same spot, but one choice is fairly suboptimal there.
But this is why some executives are better for some kinds of businesses and others are better for other kinds. Some executives don't understand your parent comment's point (or just don't find it comfortable), and will be very allergic to the "waste" necessary to experiment and iterate on poorly understood projects. Other executives will be uncomfortable just constantly figuring out how to optimize costs without damaging revenues.
A very tricky part of the lifecycle of many companies that get gigantic is to figure out when to flip this and start switching out the executive team to focus on a different model.