In reality, the biggest problem was they had no incentive to invest in new lighting technology research, although they had the money to do so. It takes a lot of effort to develop a new technology, and significantly more to make it practical and affordable.
I think the story of the development of the blue LED which led to modern LED lighting is more illustrative of the real obstacles of technological development.
Companies/managers don't want to invest in R&D bc it’s too uncertain and they typically are more interested in the short term.
And it’s hard for someone without deep technical knowledge to identify a realistic worthwhile technical idea from a bad one. So they focus on what they can understand and what they can quantify ().
And even technical people can fail to properly evaluate ideas that are even slightly outside their area of expertise (or even sometimes the ones that are within it )
It’s rather hard to imagine even something like that (and it’s pretty limited in scope compared to the grand conspiracy above) working today, though; the EC would definitely stomp on it, and even the sleepy FTC would probably bestir itself for something so blatant.