That's "politicking" I guess. But it's the kind of politics we want, where governments do the Right Thing because people ask them to.
This is a common motif in internet outrage, and it's not surprising to see it every day on HN which is startup focused.
Massachusetts' government is not 1 giant perfectly-in-sync machine. Nor is Apple. Nor is Microsoft. Nor is Google. They're enormous and have tons of inertia.
It is perfectly consistent for one part of such a large organization to make a routine action as part of policy, only to find that somewhere (often higher up) in the organization, priorities no longer reflect the policy in place. This means the action was an error for the organization.
It doesn't mean people are lying. It doesn't mean people are acting in bad faith at all. It means that tens of thousands of people acting toward the same goals don't manage to act with perfect information.
I suppose it just seems odd that someone would think to themselves "lets plan out how to ticket someone and then issue a cease and desist" without doing due diligence to ensure that they even need to do any of it.
Just sounds like a politicking to me.