It's at least plausible that there was some good engineering analysis up front to decide whether the flash endurance was good enough for what they were doing an

It's at least plausible that there was some good engineering analysis up front to decide whether the flash endurance was good enough for what they were doing and it was, and then some time later after the hardware designs were in production the software was changed by some other engineer who wasn't aware of the earlier analysis or the fundamental limitations of the hardware. Abstraction is one of those things that makes software development tolerable; we can (usually) treat anything Turing complete as "just another computer". But once in awhile that isn't true, and you have to deal with low-level details. In retrospect we can say this ought to have been a foreseeable problem, but people are fallible and make mistakes. If not this, then something else. What I find more worrying about Telsa is their level of secrecy around car repair information in general, and their occasional reluctance to own their mistakes and fix them for free.