An interesting and pretty classic dynamic - I liked the article overall but I think this point didn't get the highlighting it deserved. If 30% of the people involved think that the calculator is a bad idea that signals a potentially huge problem even if the majority think it is fine.
Be alert to the politics here. Although it seems otherwise, people generally don't like to criticise other teams in the business unless there is a political gain to be had. By extension, if I polled the company and asked "is this thing my team did a net positive?" I'd expect the default position to be "yes" as people wouldn't want to stir the pot for no reason. 30% of people signalling that it might be value-destructive is much more significant than it seems because of that. It should trigger some fairly thoughtful consideration of why exactly they thought that.
In this case they seem to have indeed been alert to all that and the story has a happy ending, which is nice. But this poll result was always evidence of a serious problem.