Comment by saghm

The article (or I guess more accurately "podcast transcription") seems to be saying that this lock-in essentially happened due to fraud, since some of the data was intentionally doctored to get the intended result. One of the guests seems to be an author of a different book about this (with the other guest being the scientist who apparently uncovered this). I can't personally attest to the accuracy of anything they said, but they're at least alleging that it was a lot less benign than it sounds like you're describing.