Maybe I’m misinterpreting the article. But I fail to see how the question (or leaving a conversation in the middle) added anything to the solution. Their colleague executed despite a problematic conversation.
As a middle manager myself though, I understand why you jumped to that conclusion. Because this is an example of highly efficient behavior in a system of imperfect humans, which all large teams are. Typically in a large cross-functional teams, engineers are not incentivized to question product requirements because it's not technically their job. But in practice, engineers closest to the problem are best positioned to recognize requirement flaws and directly contribute to better solutions. When I got my start in web development this was just the norm because no one understood the web yet, so both traditional designers as well as human-computer interaction specialists were out of their depth, and product manager wasn't a career path that people could go into to make big bucks without any technical knowledge the way it became after the web and mobile revolutions went mainstream and tech became the new finance for the blindly ambitious.