I'd thought about that angle, and I've known a couple of those myself over the years (mostly second hand). But even in the cases I've seen, things might have gone much smoother had there been stronger communication about the specifics and what was (and was not) possible much earlier.

As soon as things look to be not possible, tell someone. If you're able to pull a rabbit out of a hat later on, great, but let people know that real hard limits (algorithm, processing speed, etc) are being hit. sometimes what someone was indicating was a hard requirement turns out to be a 'oh, it'd be nice to have that, let's move on' sort of thing.

So, while I get your point, I think overall there's still things people can do wrt communication even when there are fundamentally tech issues at stake.