This sounds like “taint” in the M&A space. I’ve very limited experience of it and would be interested in hearing more from the better informed folks on this topic!

My limited experience: my then-employer opted not to acquire a company after doing due diligence. Ultimately we decided that the price of acquisition (both paid out, and also incurred in internal time) was below the cost of building a comparable product ourselves.

As the dev who did the tech portion of the due diligence I was now “tainted” by my knowledge of their system. As a result I could not work directly on the effort to build our own comparable solution.