This narrative is "middle-middle management lies, cheats, and steals at every turn and sometimes on other people's turns too".
And while we might question that narrative about execs, we know that it is unfailingly true of middle management. It's not unexpected, that's what happens when perverse incentive is piled on top of perverse incentive. Someone was racing for a bonus. And discovery's going to show that there was some absurd uptick in how many OEM odometers for this model were ordered in the problem years, far in excess of anything that had happened previously.