It did play into that at the start, then there was a small problem that the setting made no sense when put under any scrutiny, a running theme that will persist throughout battletech's lore because very few writers understand how logistics work. And so because BT wanted to pride itself on being grounded sorta grimdark, the guys at FASA had to walk back a lot of the ideas of mechs being rare, introduce limited production of new mechs, but the circlejerk over the space roman empire (Star League/Terran Hegemony) remained.