>received wisdom about military things can be just completely wrong.
Consider that what you thought was "received wisdom" was literally Russian propaganda. However, the actual reality was always there, always being patiently insisted by people who knew what they were talking about, who were in fact still discussing actual boondoggles with the program, like the portion of the program that built the tailhook and was terribly run and ineffective at points.
People like Pierre Sprey have been shouting the same lies for decades, and credulous people with zero domain knowledge have been repeating his horse shit forever. He was the same guy who insisted that we should be building really stripped down planes without radar, without missiles, without anything.
He was very much the originator of a lot of anti-F35 FUD, on Russia Today no less. Western media was literally quoting the Russian propaganda firm to tell people how the F35 sucked. He helped push the utter BS that is "Oh, Russia's long wave radar makes stealth not work" which if you don't understand how that's irrelevant and untrue, don't ever have an opinion on modern warplanes.
There's a famous article talking about how terrible the F35 was by interviewing an F16 pilot who had faced it in dogfight training. The article talked at length about how the pilot of the F16 was able to out dogfight the F35. Now, it's sufficient to mention that gun range dogfights are not a thing in modern air combat, or at the very least are not designed for, because as long as your enemy has a single radar or IR missile left, you've already lost. However, beyond that, the F35 wasn't terrible, it's just very unlikely to match the literal king of dogfights. More importantly, the article mentioned something that I'm sure they didn't even realize the importance of.
Even at knife fighting range, the F16 radar assisted gunsight was unable to lock on to the F35. Go look at early jet aircraft gunnery statistics for an idea of how laughably bad dogfighting an F35 would be.
Oh, and that entire test was done with an F35 that wasn't allowed or capable of flying it's full envelope. It was an F35 with a hand tied behind it's back.