Well, yeah. Doing anything successfully at the scale of Wikipedia is worthy of some praise - and I say that as a US midwesterner - a culture not exactly known as the epitome of hubris. :)
You might claim I have Stockholm syndrome or something since I worked with the team that developed this feature, but the discussion you highlight did have valid feedback. The process for respecting community governance and developing consensus is more complicated than any one person could imagine. It is frustrating and imperfect. Folks at the foundation like myself are trying to do better in how we approach, work with, and deploy software changes. I agree too that it took a long time to develop, but that's not on any one single community's shoulders.
For instance, after doing due diligence we approached the English community again earlier this month and the result of that discussion was quite boring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscel...
For a technical example that lead to the time it took, the team looked at how we were generating the previews and saw an opportunity to improve them. Previously we tried to parse a bunch of wikitext with a list as long as my arm of exclusions and edge cases. Then the team figured out a way to return HTML summaries from the source article. Not just something useful for this feature and a huge improvement to how information is rendered (like math formulas). Refactoring the code and implementing a new API endpoint took time.
I hope this doesn't come across as too argumentative, I wanted to provide an alternative perspective from someone who works daily with product teams and communities within the Wikimedia movement.