The team's claim that you only need to run it once because the variability was well characterized in the past is also nonsense. They were constantly changing the model. Even if they thought they understood the variance in the output in the past (which they didn't), it was invalidated the moment they changed the model to reflect new data and ideas.
Look, you're trying to justify this without seeming to realize that this is Hacker News. It's a site read mostly by programmers. This team demanded and got incredibly destructive policies on the back of this model, which is garbage. It's the sort of code quality that got Toyota found guilty in court of severe negligence. The fact that academics apparently struggle to understand how serious this is, is by far a faster and better creator of anti-science narratives than anything any blogger could ever write.