This is just flimsy and irrelevant excuses to deny bounty hunters of their reward. To me, a bounty manager should be held liable if and when the project team fails to deliver on the bounty promises.
If that's the case, that would reduce the number of bounty managers in the space because one mistake they might loss their reputation or worse their account in bitcointalk might get red tag. I think we should not totally rely on the bounty manager, we should also make our own research about the project we are promoting, function of the bounty managers are more like to compute the job done or relay information from the team. to the bounty hunters.