Did you edit the wording of your original comment slightly to emphasise the "actively disallowing them" in every situation? Anyway... if that is what you meant, then ok. It's less awful a statement than what I felt I originally read.

I'd still push back on your hyperbole though. I don't think the author was insane - and we don't know what the broader business context was when they started growing the team and decided to persist without building out the test architecture at that point. They made a call that dogfooding was going to be enough to catch issues as they grew the team. There are a lot of scenarios where that is going to be true.

One scenario where it wouldn't - the most likely - is that the team isn't actually dogfooding because they personally don't find the product useful. Leadership lambasts them to use the product more... but no one does cause it sucks so much it impacts their own personal productivity.

Even there I wouldn't use the word insane... just poor leadership.