"The risk was they hedged way to much prior to full ramp up. The...

"The risk was they hedged way to much prior to full ramp up. The hedge was so far out of the money it was shareholders that were paying the wages not the incoming Gold." - This is CAI hedges right? From memory their hedges were not far out of money at the start. What happened (if I remember right) is costs spiked why too high and pushed CAI's AISC above the hedged positions and CAI made it worse due to their poor understanding of the orebody which did not produce the desired grades.
On top of that CAI could not take advantage of the spike in the gold price as the hedges were now killing them due to being significant % of the total production.
This is what happens when one tries to develop marginal deposit with not enough cash and had to borrow too much money. They got bit unlucky with Covid which pushed costs higher but what killed the project is they borrowed too much and as a result they had to lock massive % of the production in hedges that now destroyed them.
Better option would have been to if they did bigger CR and borrowed less but this is hindsight comment on my part.