The excuse given is bull. …
The excuse given is bull. My 1990 Chevy already had what appeared to be a conventional dashboard but was fully fed by a control module. Cars have not usually had mechanical dashboards since the 1980s. In the interest of fairness, I must confess, when I had it run out of gas at interstate speed, it did turn the dash off (speedo dropped to 0) exactly 10 second after the engine stalled, so it said 0 while I was doing about 65 (coasting past a bridge so I had a wider shoulder to pull off onto.)
That said... it's important for Rivian to fix this, but I assume they will indeed fix it.