Open plan in a nutshell: would you like to save 20% on seating costs for the low cost of a 30% reduction in productivity? Then open plan offices might be right for you.

The nutshell takeaway here is that concrete reductions in costs will always outweigh greater but less concrete increases in costs, because... well George Carlin covered that.

My theory is it's a classic cargo cult situation: "If we just do the same thing this successful startup did (we'll ignore that they were doing it in a different context for different reasons, and ignore the ones that did the same thing but weren't successful) then we too will have the same explosive success!"

?

One would argue that it was "dumbass" if the attempt to cut cost affected a greater loss of productivity.

But that is often the case; attempts to increase "shareholder value" come at an outsized and detrimental cost of productivity and ultimate profit. But such is life. You cannot know the outcome of two paths as you can only test one of them.