I think almost certainly, yes? But I think it would require a whole research project to gather persuasive data on this, in both directions. But my intuition is

I think almost certainly, yes? But I think it would require a whole research project to gather persuasive data on this, in both directions. But my intuition is that failing to find product market fit (for whatever reason) kills companies earlier, whereas hitting product market fit with a subpar engineering foundation is more likely to slow companies down in later stages where they die more slowly or just underachieve. I think Twitter is probably the best known example of that second pattern. It may be apocryphal that this was their problem, but either way, I think this is a real phenomenon in general.