Read the article again: it appears that the contractors said over and over "Hey, this software isn't ready yet, please please please let us fix this", and the PM said, "lol no fuckit shipit".
From having worked on timelines like this, it was probably less about the time to enable it vs. "If we turn on op code cache and that breaks part of our code, we don't have time to fix it."
Solution w/ nebulous oversight and looming deadlines? Punt it to the ops team.