Breaks have been being given less and less time for years now in the Tour. HTC really began this, even Super Mario's train let the break get 7 or 8 minutes but Bob Stapleton's train of misery just had Bert Grabsch and Tony Martin peg the breakaway at 2 minutes for 150k to the point where the people who are paid to make the race sound interesting were slating it publicly. The fact that we have so many over-strong teams and much fewer real wildcards now means that teams are also happier to try to control the race throughout, so we see far fewer instances of the jersey being shipped to a breakaway, and Jesús Herrada's run in the lead of the Vuelta was a bit of a throwback to that. 10-12 years ago it was frequent, even after Óscar Pereiro parlayed it into a Tour win. Rinaldo Nocentini in 2009, Giovanni Visconti in 2008, Thomas Voeckler in 2011, Egoi Martínez in 2008... all examples of a late week 1 or early week 2 break given its day in the sun so the big teams don't have the responsibility of carrying the jersey all the way. Astana 2009 allowed Nocentini that gap but they were a team strong enough to do what we have largely seen since from the likes of Astana for Nibali, Saxo for Contador and Sky for Wiggins and Froome, which is "take the jersey on the first mountain stage then carry it all the way".
At the same time, it's a pretty sad indictment if going in the breakaway is so pointless that even the wildcard teams can't be bothered to get their sponsors' names out there. It was like the women's race in København that people used for literally years as an example of why women's cycling was boring and not worth their time, because there wasn't any artificial 'break of the day' action and it was, indeed, very boring. The break of the day action is usually pretty pointless, yes, but at least there's the pretence of action. With a few people up the road there's some contesting of summits and intermediate sprints. Instead here, Cosnefroy picked up the mountain points unopposed, and the value of the airtime for the sponsors was considered not worth a rider spending an hour or two of their time off the front.
The value of TV time to the sponsors for the smaller teams has always warded off stages like this, historically. Now with every stage broadcast start to finish I guess the teams think they can get airtime elsewhere and by other means. I wouldn't be surprised if this starts happening more, because the value of the intermediates and primes has been eroded, the concentration of all the talent in a smaller number of teams has meant the chances of a miscalculation are hugely reduced compared to years gone by, and the killing off of ProConti as a competitive level (plus a few ProConti teams focusing on sprinters for their results because GC contenders are now off-limits to them) means fewer true baroudeurs in the bunch.