I don't think it's right to categorize "no consequences".
Leadership made a decision and that decision was bad. This happens all the time, including allocating budget for staff. Any effective organization is going to judge the outcomes of these types of decisions and it's going to come up in performance and hiring. If this was an isolated situation then possibly they won't fire anyone over it. But you really need the context to judge whether the response was correct.
Wasting company resources and making the company look bad in the press won't be rewarded, and that includes at the board level to the CEO.
It's nice to see an article like this every once and a while to remind myself that there is so much about programming still to learn. I particularly liked the javascript examples so I could play with them in my scratch pad. I am still not sure I could describe what a Y Combinator is and where to use it, but I'm much closer than I was 15 minutes ago.