Thinking about evaluation at the beginning, not at the end of a project, means that you don't fly blind during most of the project's execution duration.
I was there around 2012.
Yes, I've been working in the machine learning space for a while and I agree that it's an approach that should've been followed years ago. But I also think that now the problems of not following it are bigger, because now we have "AI as a service" so everyone can have AI in their systems.