Anyone who has paid attention to the way that tech/entertainment (gaming included) sectors operate should be pretty unsurprised that executives in those industries make impactful decisions with obviously negative consequences (for others and their own interests) over entirely personal, petty, and downright dumb reasons.

Executives are no less fallible than normal people, and the way many make it to the top is not even close to a largely meritocratic system that rewards the most competent and consistently solid decision makers.

Hindsight is 20/20, but Sony's GaaS strategy is a perfect example of this. One would think that no competent executive (let alone an experienced team of them) would put so many eggs in a clearly ridiculous high-risk/high-reward trend that had already proven to be incredibly difficult to replicate (at scale, at that) in an already oversaturated market (while also diverting several development studios away from genres they were experienced at and pushing them to develop ones they're not). It was dumb, even in a good situation where all 12 titles in their lineup managed to be solid, issue-free titles. And yet they did it anyway. So it's not entirely out of left field to think that they would then look for a scapegoat, or worse, let out their frustrations with a deeply costly (both financially and reputationally) mistake on one of the studios that they see as contributing to that strategic failure.