Hypothetically yes. But in some cases, you are hired by a department in a large division of a huge corp., with many layers of management above the department that hired you. And the end product is for a department in a totally different division of the corp. In such a case, you don't have access to the actual end customer.
The right move at the point where it got presented to and rejected by the other division was probably to say "Well, I built what we agreed on. I'm happy to revise the product based on this external feedback, but that's not included in the original fee".
But the article did say that this was at a point in his career where he might not have been experienced enough to make that call.
