Readit NewsThose cases involving eminent domain and rats are the most dramatic, but it works at a more pedestrian level too. Say a government wants to dispose of some disused rail-yard or something. A developer who says "I'm going build some big shiny shops and attractions here" has better optics than a developer who says "I'm going to lay down some infrastructure and parcel the land up to whoever wants to buy it, nature will decide what the land is used for".
The latter is actually quite likely to produce the higher economic value land use, but there is no good political narrative. And in a world of strict zoning rules, there might not even be a legal framework for it.
But efficient enough to go some distance, reliable enough not to need a full-time repair-man, and cheap enough to be sold to people who didn't already own a horse & carriage? That needed lots more technology.
You also need people to ride it. It wouldn't fly as a palace amusement because the king (and more importantly the little prince) would keep falling off. They won't have an incentive to value the skill until there is a horde of middle-class, 19th century, hipsters showing him up.
A circus act is more plausible, but only if there's some continuum of other simpler circus equipment leading up to this rather sophisticated bit of engineering.
Vikings transported Crucible steel all the way from Afghanistan to make high end swords. Damascus steel(actually manufactured in India) and then forged into weapon in Damascus.. etc
There got to be other reasons. Better or equivalent to Crucible steel but en masss.. you can have forged plate for everyone, horse full armor, heat treated crossbow bolt heads etc.
The assumption here is that every thing works in a clear way so you can see the military or whatever advantages of a particular phenomenon. Now I don't know if AnimalMuppet is literally correct that the bureaucracy simply shut down the steel industry -- but if it happened it would be because all that cheep steel was not being used for obvious things, like the imperial army, but for other unexpected uses. Maybe arms and armour still had to be made the old fashioned way anyhow, so there was no immediate military advantage.
More likely, things were subtler. Things innovations can strangled long before their importance is clear. Imperial China had a vibrant merchant class, but it isn't the kind of place that is likely to tolerate the "disruptive innovation" which fuelled Britain's Industrial Revolution -- where a bunch of upstarts come and do things with unexpected things. Even modern China (or for that matter the modern United States) struggles with it.
Another part is hiring a breed of test engineers who like breaking stuff and have a knack for it.
It's a role that would have been called secretary at one time. The title change was intended to show more respect and try ditch some historical social baggage for such jobs.
There's whole classes of highly paid engineers whose job is to do this. But they work for old fashioned, boring, companies.
To be fair, back in the day when you had a single web server, analytics was easy. I to miss the days of being able to do a 'tail -f web.log' and watch as your page hit Slashdot...
And then fall over?
I miss the days of The Slashdot Effect[1]. Now it's the JS that makes my PC fall over.
[1] Come to think of it The Slashdot Effect would have been a good band name back in the '90s.