I once saw something like that where there was an existing codebase and a different business unit in the company wanted to add a large new feature.

The contractors simply wanted to get paid, naturally. The people who paid them didn't understand the original codebase, and they did not communicate with the people who designed and built the original codebase either. The people who built the original code were overworked and saw the whole bruhaha as a burden over which they had no control.

It was a low seven figure contract. The feature was scrapped after two or three years while the original product lived on and evolved for many years after that.

I hope that management learned their lesson, but I doubt it.