In most corporations, there is constant internal miscommunication. Higher ups always oversimplify things and the lower level people doing the work find themselves knee deep in complexity while trying to meet unrealistic, overly simplistic goals.
Molyneux was made into a marketing guy and had to make the product look good. As a manager he had to impress the higher ups and meet their demands and rely on the lower level people to make it a reality. This is insane and a total gamble, but this is how companies work.
I'm going through something like that right now. The higher ups have gone and promised something to some major clients that I'm not sure I'm able to deliver. They went and decided on it without doing any kind of feasibility analysis or even just asking me, and the manager 1 level above me has gone and extolled its virtues in front of the clients. Now I have to bust ass to deliver it, but if I don't succeed or if I have to make compromises to make it work, I'll look bad internally, and she will look like Molyneux internally and externally, having shown off this feature in public.
For video games, this is all amplified by everything being public and "viral" across social media.
The higher ups can just say "you have [x] qualification so you should have been able to do it" and can sleep soundly at night, as manipulators who believe their own bullshit do. Almost every corporation I've ever worked for has operated like this routinely.
So I really did not enjoy seeing Molyneux get so much hate. He's obviously a technical and creative guy, and should not be in a marketing role trying to achieve dysfunctional objectives set by upper management. Imagine being the marketing guy and developer at the same time. Just imagine the expectations the upper management must have of you.