I worked at DG for 13 years (albeit a few years post-Eagle) and I've never heard anything along those lines. And the company liked the book as far as I can tell--they regularly gave copies away at the executive briefing center.
I have no doubt there were embellishments for the purposes of narrative. And people always have different takes on all sort of things that they participated in at a company. But I've never heard it was substantially inaccurate and I knew a number of people in "the book" pretty well.
I definitely didn't intend to endorse this view. I think if it was really true that they had purposely misled him and he'd taken it all in then there would be some major technical 'howlers' in the book. As far as I can see there aren't any.
Maybe they didn't like the way they were portrayed - which I can understand - and there was a collective, organic 'well of course it wasn't like that' soon after the book was published.
Yeah, I was product manager for a number of subsequent 32-bit MV minicomputers and, later, a number of Unix-based systems including the big NUMA servers. It's been a while since I read the book but I certainly don't recall anything that caused me to go "That can't be right."
No first-hand knowledge of all the internal politics that shook out in the creation of the MV/8000 (Eagle) but, again, never heard anyone say it was BS and I knew many folks both in Westboro and RTP quite well.
A kind reader pointed me towards an interview with Dick Sonderegger who worked at Data General at time of the development of Eagle [1].
His view based on discussions with people who appeared in the book is interesting:
'They did not have flattering things to say about Tracy Kidder ... This is a historical novel, this is not what actually happened'.
'To a man [they said] he didn't know anything, we could have told him anything and he could have bought it. And reading the book that's accurate'
DG section is at approx 21 mins
[1] https://operationcode.org/podcast#dick-sonderegger-link