This might be terminology that's used differently in different places. For instance, in video games it is extremely common to use "postmortem" to mean "post-shipping."

Example: https://blog.codinghorror.com/game-development-postmortems/ Note the dual emphasis on both "what went right" and "what went wrong," not just one or the other.

I've been reading people use "postmortem" to describe software retrospectives for like... 15+ years.

Mostly in the opensource, or marketing-blog spaces. The detailed investigation and fix report was a favorite genre of blogpost. And if someone's bragging about the design of an enhancement, or investigating a bug, then the overall product isn't dead. They're (usually) not talking shit to anyone. It's the bug that's dead. Or security indecent that's over. Or a schedule milestone that's "dead and burred".

It's a 1 chili pepper level of spicy to use a slang term that relates to death. I'd never read it as hoping someone fails. I think people let the corpotalk center of the brain overreact to anything that's not couched in euphemism.

From the article:

> The goal of a postmortem is to draw meaningful conclusions to help you learn from your past successes and failures. Despite its grim-sounding name, a postmortem can be an extremely productive method of improving your development practices.