Well, I did say "one of the reasons", but you're rights that it as implicit that was the main reason. I also should have prefaced that this has been my own personal experience in call centers.
What you're saying is definitely a problem in some (maybe most) call centers. Companies tend to see call centers as places where money goes to die, instead of a potential treasure trove of information about their customers and what's going wrong or right with their strategies. I think that does lead to what you're talking about. Everything becomes about low balling the customer. If they have a return, you try to give them ten bucks to keep it. If they think the item is broken, you tell them why it's normal for the item to be that way. I'll be the first to admit that I underplay that portion because my financial situation is fairly good and I'd leave a company that acted that way. It's misguided and doesn't do anything for building your brand.
I'd take that a step further, though, and say that your scenario suffers from another big problem. Some call centers place a huge priority on wrote scripting and the customer ends up feeling like they never stopped talking to the IVR. Some reps can put life into a script, but most can't, and you end up with a really sterile, impersonal experience that screams "you're a statistic to us."
My personal experience has been, the more you can let your reps drop the script, the higher your CSAT/NPS scores will climb (obviously to a point). Of course, people have guidelines, but I tend to think most of those go too far. If you're in a brick and mortar retail shop, you don't usually have someone hiding behind a shelf marking down whether or not you used the customers name 2.3 times during the interaction. And I should mention that this is going to change depending on the type of business. An e-commerce site processing a return isn't going to be quite as mired in legal scripting as a financial institution laying out the terms of a loan.
As a final note, I'll get back to the 911 operator context. Yes, the article is written in a way to elicit a response. I'm not going to hold it up the standards of a well-respected peer-reviewed journal article. I still absolutely think you're wrong with that one, for a lot of reasons others have spoken on. It's not in any way implausible or hyperbolic to think a 911 call center would take two months to adequately train a rep, especially if they're using fairly standard training practices.