I'm going to guess no. Had the guy just asked anyone who's used to driving old beater cars from the late carb/early EFI they probably would have guessed vapor

I'm going to guess no. Had the guy just asked anyone who's used to driving old beater cars from the late carb/early EFI they probably would have guessed vapor lock or heat soaked ignition components right off the bat (probably with a little skepticism because new cars very rarely do that) and then tried to confirm/rule it out. Vapor lock is a basically solved problem (and has been for 30+yr, the OEMs test for those kinds of things before they scale up production) the engineer will likely weight it lower as a possibility than the more oddly specific things. It's kind of like how a 2nd line IT person may miss rebooting a device as a potential solution because none of the problems they chase down have easy solutions like that.