I think that the typical usage of that phrase is as cover for shitty companies to treat their workers like dog shit. If a company/manager is using that line then actually backing it up in their actions, more power to them.
I'm just so annoyed, being a gamer and a corporate drone. There are innumerable projects that would make companies money, but they can't handle a few quarters of r&d to get them done. Sometimes you are then tasked with a less successful project, but what's worse is when you go back to useless tasks that bring no value, and then a year later some big brain businessman says "this thing sucks, why don't we have better things".
Games are harder and a long term investment, but that's literally your product, deal with it. So many half ass games right now that could have been amazing and wildly successful if they were smart about it.
One example, Hogwarts Legacy. Very successful at launch, but with an empty world. Why are they not churning out DLCs for that right now?? At this point if they had immediately pivoted to that we could have at least one good story dlc and a handful of addons, and they would be printing cash. Instead they focused on, what was that flop of a game?
Suicide squad, a live service turd. And it flopped. Big. Meanwhile Hogwards is making tons of money as a normal single player game. So the studio does the only sane thing: they announced they are ditching single player games to focus on live service games.