> Makes what the world would look like if, say, the Manhattan Project would have been managed the same way.

It was not possible for a war-time government crash project to have been managed the same way. During WW2 the existential fear was an embodied threat currently happening. No one even was even thinking about a potential for profits or even any additional products aside from an atomic bomb. And if anyone had ideas on how to pursue that bomb that seemed like a decent idea, they would have been funded to pursue them.

And this is not even mentioning the fact that security was tight.

I'm sure there were scientists who disagreed with how the Manhattan project was being managed. I'm also sure they kept working on it despite those disagreements.