I might be wrong about this, but if I remember right, the PR team for NMS and the dev team had pretty much zero communication. Sony kept hyping the game up, very much making promises that the devs were trying to keep. However during development it became increasingly that they either need to push back on the release date or drop some features, neither of which Sony was ready to do. At that point it was already too late: the hype was built.

So instead of trying to do damage control Sony just pushed Murray in the focus, probably hoping he and his company would take the fall. Honestly it feels hard to blame him for what happened. He, at the time, was just an incredibly ambitious indie dev with no idea on how to manage expectations.

I feel like with Sony as your publisher, you don't need enemies.