This is a good way of putting it. People who advocate for over-engineering don't consider cost-benefit vs not doing it. This is where FMEA analysis comes in when developing products, you assign values for severity, occurrence, and detection to determine which potential issues need extra effort implemented, but just as important is identifying the potential issues that aren't worth putting effort into to prevent over-engineering.
I've recently had to deal with a problem where the parent company has dictated 100% production testing for a spec that we meet for the spec sheet but customers practically don't ever need. But since the parent company test their products this way they say we have to. I've been very vocally against this because it has delayed us shipping products that are otherwise ready, prevented starting new products, and added a lot of production cost when our RMA rate without the test is something on the order of 0.01% and most of those are due to installation errors, not true failures.