I agree with you. There is an advantage to being first on market, but the "damn the consequences" part is very much VC-fueled. Start-ups going to market (and failing) as fast as possible is very much in the financial interest of the VC, but generally good neither the startup nor its employees nor the ecosystem.

I've lived through several semi-disastrous VC-pushed early product launches, and have seen some being sufficiently bad to entirely destroy a product, despite it being extremely useful.