Yep. Chatting with other practitioners is a powerful way to learn how things actually work. There are tons of things that "everyone" knows that are not well documented, and therefore unavailable to people outside the network.

This is a more-consequential example of the things you can learn by chatting with others; it is an extreme example of, "Hey, are you guys using components from Widget Inc.? Their datasheets are good, but sometimes we get a bad batch."

Those little things can save you a ton of time. In this case, it may have prevented mission-failure.

Part of the blame falls to NASA, too. If the outcome is your responsibility, then open-loop trust of a vendor for a known failure-mode may not be acceptable. Integration rad-hard testing may be requisite.

In the spacecraft environment, qualifying components is very difficult -- there's a good chance that NASA has these MOSFETs on an approved list because they've worked well before and have had few (or known) faults. They're probably not on that list anymore.