What if then? Should they have just bodied the thing for the love of the game? So that people uncaring for their wellbeing then wouldn't have appreciated it as a sacrifice anyhow?

Quite often I find that if people stopped holding fundamentally broken dynamics together and just let the thing fail and fail hard, the overall long term outcome would be better off. Much to the opposite of your suggestion.

It's just that turns out, things being properly bodied or properly broken take coordinated action. People deciding one by one, one way or the other, is what actually enables and sustains pathological dynamics like this.

But then how does one single out any specific decision? Well, nohow, not with any rigor for sure.