The abstract says it really:

"It was clearly a top-down decision"

Many many things that are imposed like this will fail.

Its not willful non-compliance even, its just that its hard for people to do things differently, while still being the same people in the same teams, making the same products, with the same timelines...

Context is key here, lots of people see a thing that works well and think they can copy the activities of the successful team, without realising they need to align the mindset.. and the activities will follow. The activities might be different, and thats OK! In a different context, you'd expect that.

I'd argue that in most contexts you don't need a QA team at all, and if you do have one, then it will look a lot different to what you might think. For example, it would be put after a release, not before it.. QA teams are too slow to deal with 2000+ releases a year - not their fault, they are human.. need to reframe the value statement.