Good point. I didn't have that perspective in mind so the wording was off.
My sentiment was that if a company is losing money consistently and egregiously, they are on borrowed time and a borrowed dime in very real terms as the trajectory is towards 0 - but the context is largely psychological. To your point, waste is waste. I agree wasting cash generated from profits is equivalent to wasting it from earnings.
I'd insist there is some practically relevant difference in there though.
Wasting money during a trajectory to bankruptcy creates a narrative of negligence that accelerates failure, while wasting it during a consistently profitable trajectory seems like sub-optimal management. The kind of thing that is theoretically identical, but in the real world of behavioral economics, the former seems more certain due to how easily the trajectory to failure can be estimated. The latter creates a weak narrative because of hidden information - nobody will ever know what "could have been" and so can never quantify how sub-optimal the management was.
E.g. nobody is dragging GE executives out of retirement/the grave to answer for long-term effects of sub-optimal management, and further nobody could prove at the time it was sub-optimal, only hypothesize. On the other hand, everything Elon Musk does at Tesla is torn apart and front page news, because they have a trajectory towards failure a high school student could easily calculate.
So "management's responsibility" to optimally allocate capital is sound in theory, but in the real world of imperfect and outright unknowable information, nobody ever really knows what optimal is. Sub-optimal comes to be expected as normal, but accelerating a trend towards failure is a powerful defining narrative. Somehow this matters.