It’s not guaranteed that it’s interpreted as a platitude by the person it’s directed at, and when the mismatch between the task and the work done is big enough to make it obviously a platitude, it’s just patronising, and risks being more insulting than not saying it at all.
The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, “good attempt” could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn’t good at all, it’s bad. If you’d asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it’s impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it’s completely inappropriate as it’d stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it’s incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it’s sensitive to moisture.
The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.
I’ve seen turboprops in museums and on the internet with around six or eight blades. When I looked on the Wikipedia page for propfan engines, which seems to be another name for an open turbofan, the distinction seemed to be mainly how the blades were shaped (like propellor blades or turbine blades) and how tightly-integrated everything is (you can swap the propeller out on a turboprop).
How many blades do you have to add to a turboprop before it’s promoted to an open turbofan and touted as a major new innovation?
The meme doesn’t really work. The working-class people who played football the most always called it football. Upper-class people at public schools (don’t confuse this with state schools - in the UK, public schools are even posher and more expensive than private schools, and the name comes from letting anyone who could afford the fees in, not from any intention to educate the general public) needed to distinguish it from Rugby Football so they could make a rule against playing it, and invented the name Association Football. There’s a tradition at public schools to shorten names in a particular way (Rugby football to rugger, buggery to bugger etc.) and when applying that to association football, it becomes soccer. Soccer has always been a term used to mock poor people who play football instead of rugby, so of course it’s badly-received when people say it.