The alternative would have been "good developers, bad project managers", which would have been too brutal. Someone had to figure out the infra requirements, and

The alternative would have been "good developers, bad project managers", which would have been too brutal. Someone had to figure out the infra requirements, and it could only be someone with knowledge of the volume of preorders. That's not going to be developers, but rather someone in the corporate hierarchy. I think the article is extremely charitable. They could have named every exec who made the call on the key features that brought about disaster (forcefully turning a solo game into a multiplayer one, underestimating requirements, etc etc) and instead they just said "EA", effectively absolving everyone but "the man".