Like say they have one that is setup to test the motor driver circuitry and another one that is setup to test the motor?
Or say the breakout box intentionally has both sides of the connection on it, so that you can get in-between the driver and motor?
So either the ends are literally the same (e.g. Anderson Powerpole), or there is some kind of weird symmetry or inadequate keying. Or maybe the two cables don’t connect directly and instead go through some of kind of interface? The latter is fairly common in networking, e.g. “feed-through” patch panels and keystone jacks and quite a few kinds of fiber optic connectors.
All of these seem like utterly terrible ideas in an application where you would take the thing apart after final assembly and where the person doing the disassembly or reassembly could possibly access the wrong side of the panel.
In that case keying or whatever isn't going to prevent you from connecting to the wrong side, because both sides are present.
I'm suspecting the breakout wasn't literally sitting between the driver and the motor, but rather all internal connections are broken out to the box for testing; and likely the author's mistake was to not mess with the spacecraft to temporarily disconnect the driver.
But I'm not sure if I'd "just" made the right call and done so nonchalantly on a Mars rover to launch in few weeks.
How … how often does that go wrong?!
Control cables also can and do break, but that too is fairly rare.
What is not rare is control mechanisms jamming. Here is an example:
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20230928A.a...
"The incident was featured in season 23, episode 5 of the Canadian documentary series Mayday . . ." [1]
Season 23 - I'm glad I don't fly!