When the Nazis made expensive, hard-to-maintain tanks like the Tiger, was that an ideological decision or a secular mistake that any military could have made?
I'm not sure what would the ideological link be.
But about the reasoning of the Wunderwaffe.
The popular dichotomy between the triumph-of-will and triump-of-technology in warfare has been present in the Wehrmacht since the 1940, however not as it is commonly portrayed in popular culture.
In 1940, after the Battle of France, while the allies built their own propaganda myth of the countless german panzer divisions, Germany made certain propaganda materials focused on the technical and technological might of the French Army, specifically the Maginot Line, underlining the propaganda statement that advanced war technology meant nothing compared to the 'fierce german national spirit', thus effectively siding with the triumph-of-will side of the aforementioned dichotomy. An ideological link could be established here, that a german 'ubermensch' can achieve victory even over a better equipped opponent. This also has a cultural link we can trace all the way back to Beowulf, about a lone, strong, hero figure.
However, as the aforementioned dichotomy is not false only in propaganda simplifications, and one shouldn't stick to it, Germans ( as well as Japanese, see IJN's decisive battle naval doctrine ) were well aware of the industrial capacity of US and Soviet Union, and were well aware that they couldn't outproduce them in standard weaponry, so they opted to focus on quality instead of quantity, to put it in layman's terms.
Given the temporal context where military technology was developing exponentially fast in all fields, instead, they invested their time and resources in hopes of gaining a technological edge, developing 'indestructible' and 'unsinkable' weapons, that they believed paired with the 'unbeatable' warrior ethos/mythos could win the war.
Simply put, they didn't have much of an alternative.