Relying on a company with enough slack to have senior engineers who can dedicate 6 months to a whim project and spare people to recruit in, seems not ideal.
And the IT world is rife with unfinished, unsuccessful projects and people building themselves into corners. Your anecdote worked for your employer, but there are plenty of stories about "just started coding" leading to "big tangle of unmaintainable insecure slow messy code full o' bugs".
Message: any project would be cancelled if we knew ahead of time how hard its going to be.
Just started coding - it was a mechanical process to vet every pointer usage for the new address space limitations. That example could be done that way.
And the IT world is rife with unfinished, unsuccessful projects and people building themselves into corners. Your anecdote worked for your employer, but there are plenty of stories about "just started coding" leading to "big tangle of unmaintainable insecure slow messy code full o' bugs".