Working in a corp environment myself (yeah, unfortunately, although it does offer an insider outlook you cannot get elsewhere...), I think I have an idea of what CDPR tries to say here by presenting the co-founder's rendition of what is actually a written apology by someone (proof-read I guess, approved by someone else as well, probably). I would personally think this is an honest* apology from a company where someone understood that the wrong path was taken (* as honest as it can be, coming from a corp ;-) ).
Unfortunately in real life you cannot take a step back and use your last "good save" to undo bad decisions and they will have to cope with it and with the upcoming consequences, if the legal actions take place. So they will pay the price of negligence, if we take them to their word. Sad but true. In a sense, poetic justice, if you remember the claims about "meaningful story path choices...".
Having said that, I really hope they do survive the onslaught and manage to make this right. Corp segregation can have a lot of times too many undesirable effects, most commonly misrepresentation of an actual situation. Becoming "too big, too fast" is not an understatement for any company.
This is how I "read" this message:
Chapter 1: Mashin' in
Dev A has feedback, Dev B has feedback and so on... Then someone is remotely making a mash up of all this feedback, then makes nice charts of things and calls this QA management (within a certain margin of error) = "
our testing did not show many of the crashes you experienced while playing the game".
Chapter 2: Chartin' in
Sub-manager A then checks it and sees if it turns up roughly alright and calls up a meeting with Manager-B to present nice looking charts and bits of content, but as everyone is very busy in remote work, the quick meeting is just a nice presentation and loses much of what a "close up" experience would reveal (thus the mention to the "COVID situation" in the apology).
Sub-manager-A comes back with the good news that the boss is happy and that he/she made the right promises, which also however sets the tone for the upcoming harder work.
Chapter 3: Trendin' in
Then more feedback from devs comes about "some"improvements" then the new charts show a nice little trendline that seems to go nicely with expectations of a more stable product for consoles = "
As we got closer to launch, we saw significant improvements each and every day ".
Chapter 4: (Over-)promisin' in
New meetings, blah blah, more nice presentations and then manager B is ready to make big announcements - not to you and me, the board of course; and now since everyone set expectations based on some good trendlines and hoping that statistics would do their magic in real life (it doesn't work, really), the big dogs proceed to the announcements, which brings everyone to the line where they cannot go back without making someone look too stupid for making this decision.
The decision of course was this:
"
...wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjusting it to consoles — especially old-gens."
becoming more like this:
"
it works on old-gen consoles surprisingly well!".
Meanwhile more homework starts showing its ugly face and contradicting claims. Now it's too late...
Chapter 5: Crashin' in
Somewhere there everything starts falling apart and you get the delayed launches and more crunches to patch it up and try to save someone from making what seems to be the biggest mistaken promise ever for CDPR. But the damage has already been done.
Really guys, just saying "it cannot be compatible with old-gen. period" would have been less harmful, even financially than this mess... not to mention the PR damage and legal fallout this will bring... not to mention also it would have freed up more devs for actual content and optimizations, rather than sacrifice more work-hours/money to "please make the damn stuff work on old-gen FFS!"... next time please try to listen to the devs more and cross-check your data better...
Wall of text ends here, thanks for reading