Likewise with chip software tooling; despite it being standard to outsource tooling to large EDA vendors, we got a lot of mileage out using our own custom tools, generally created or maintained by one person, e.g., while I was there, most simulator cycles were run on a custom simulator that was maintained by one person, which saved millions a year in simulator costs (standard pricing for a simulator at the time was a few thousand dollars per license per year and we had a farm of about a thousand simulation machines). You might think that, if a single person can create or maintain a tool that's worth millions of dollars a year to the company, our competitors would do the same thing, just like you might think that if you can ship faster and at a lower cost by hiring a person who knows how to crack a wafer open, our competitors would do that, but they mostly didn't.
Have worked in EDA and .. yeah, the software is bad but the buyers are conservative, precisely because it's a risky and expensive business.
He talks about a "cocktail party version of the EMH". The credentialed econ version of "nothing works" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons , which discusses the role of information and its asymmetry in markets. The EMH fails precisely because total knowledge is impossible and adverse selection is real.
There are some companies that represent the opposite of what OP describes. Once you work with one of them, I've found it impossible to settle for one of the bad places.
Likewise with chip software tooling; despite it being standard to outsource tooling to large EDA vendors, we got a lot of mileage out using our own custom tools, generally created or maintained by one person, e.g., while I was there, most simulator cycles were run on a custom simulator that was maintained by one person, which saved millions a year in simulator costs (standard pricing for a simulator at the time was a few thousand dollars per license per year and we had a farm of about a thousand simulation machines). You might think that, if a single person can create or maintain a tool that's worth millions of dollars a year to the company, our competitors would do the same thing, just like you might think that if you can ship faster and at a lower cost by hiring a person who knows how to crack a wafer open, our competitors would do that, but they mostly didn't.