A weird thing about the sunk cost fallacy: it's actually correct to throw good money after bad if the remaining cost of the bad plan is less than the total cost of the good plan, even given that the net cost of the bad plan is higher than the good plan. It's also not necessarily any more obvious what the remaining cost is than it was what the net cost would be!
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in reply to @nex3's post:
This is assuming bad and good plans are both like... equal in the outcome, right? "Finish the (bad infrastructure) that will do the same thing as the (good infrastructure)..." but they'll effectively make the same benefit/money/whatever?
It's valid to assume that the results of completing a bad plan in a coordinated way will be better than the results of trying to abort and reorient in mid stride when deeply committed. The first example that comes to my mind is in competitive league of legends: when a team engages another team in a fight a little badly, it becomes a choice: write off one or two deaths and maybe cede a map objective or two as the cost of disengagement, or risk getting aced and losing more map objectives by committing hard and coordinating their abilities as a group to try to win the fight. Clean disengage is much harder than making up for a sloppy engage with coordinated aggression. Losing a fight with 3 lost to 2 killed can be better than retreating with 1 or even 0 lost if no map objectives are ceded because both teams are hurt and need to regroup.
Other kinds of projects can have a similar type of calculus going on: part of the cost of the bad plan may be tepid results. But it can also be a choice between tepid and nothing, given time constraints, budget constraints, etc.
Let's say you've spent 10 hours building a cabinet from scratch in you garage. You realize, with despair, that it would have only cost 4 hours to drive to an Ikea, buy a flat-pack cabinet, drive home, and assemble it, and it would have been just as functional and sturdy as your hand-made cabinet.
The "sunk cost fallacy" would, of course, be saying "I've already sunk 10 hours into my cabinet, if I give up and buy an Ikea cabinet now, those hours were wasted!" The counter-argument would be, "those hours have already been wasted either way, it's better to accept the loss and build an ikea cabinet if that's faster than finishing your cabinet, without worrying about the lost hours". The "throwing good money after bad" would be spending more hours on your hand-made cabinet instead of starting over with the faster project.
What Natalie is saying is, if finishing your cabinet only takes an additional 2 hours, then actually, finishing the hand-made cabinet is the better choice. Even though the planoverall was less efficient, if you're already close to finishing, then it isn't a fallacy to stick to the plan instead of starting over with a new, more efficient plan.
In this example:
The "remaining cost of the bad plan" is 2 hours to finish the hand-made cabinet.
The "total cost of the good plan" is 4 hours to buy and build the Ikea cabinet.
And the "net cost of the bad plan" is 10 hours.
Your observation is correct, but I don't think it actually applies to the Platonic Ideal of the Sunk-Cost Fallacy. The canonical example is something like gambling, where past expenditures are simply lost, with no return. A more practical example is stock investing, where each stock invested earns an independent return, and each dollar invested has no impact on the return of past or future investment choices.
What you're describing, where past investment changes ROI of future decisions, is different. But it's important to observe that it's different! Naively avoiding fallacies can easily become a type of cargo-culting and lead one astray, and many fallacies are adjacent to truths.