I recall trying to play that E.T. game on Atari. It never made any sense to me. Perhaps that’s why they thought it best to just dump it.
I don’t know, never played home consoles when they were new. Not every game is gonna attain a Pac-Man level of success. The only reason to trash what they did is they knew Atari was doomed, and dumped it to clean house. Who knows, eh?