Sure, people working on the game did an analysis and determined it was not a worthy cost for the benefit.
They have the data. Why else would they choose an objectively inferior option?
I'm not sure how you're confused? Pinging information off of players with consumer grade internet connections from whoever the fuck who knows ISP vs. players all sending and downloading data from a server farm built entirely for and optimized for sending and receiving information as quickly as possible with business grade internet.
In what world does option 1 offer a better experience? It isn't magic how online games work, interpolation has to make up for ping and when that interpolation is obvious to the player is when unfair things happen in the game. When the game has dedicated servers you can hopefully be sure that anytime that occurs, it's because of the players internet connection experiencing issues. When the game is P2P, there are more points where failure can happen and all of them may case an unfair experience to happen.
More points for failure = worse experience, even if you ignore the consistently lower pings dedicated servers will have.
It's obvious why they would choose an inferior option, if they do not have a dedicated server near someone and that persons data has to travel a long arduous journey back and forth, then dedicated servers may be worse than P2P for that region. To make dedicated servers work there has to be widespread servers for each region and it's expensive.
I don't doubt the cost is high, but people can still be disappointed. And P2P is worse.