Perhaps the team planned a rewrite long ago and stopped worrying about the quality of their code, which seemed obsolete in the moment it was written. Over the years, however, there was always something more important than the "soon-to-be" rewrite.
I agree. An ethicists/moralist does not care about the content of the interests that bring people into conflict. He wants to constrain these conflicts by an additional feat of good behavior, just so that everyone adds an additional moral attitude to what they do or must do – at work or in the family – that leads to good works instead of evil deeds.
And thinking in this schema is not only a mistake, but it produces a theoretical reversal in a certain literal sense. People experience their environment and the interests that exist in it as a conflict, as an injury. And they do not hold this experience against this environment, but against themselves: their bad behavior.
Hopefully Google can distinguish them from the "By browsing this site, you accept the use of Cookies [X]"-popups that EU websites have to implement now.
I agree. Almost everything useful around us is the product of ideas with our needs in mind, there was no TV and TV remote control in nature, no vacuum cleaner, clothes, watches... if ever, nature inspired us. We create artitifical things that make us more efficient and effective than it would be by just dealing with raw stones and sticks as they are found in nature. When it comes to today OOP we have to deal with stones and sticks again instead of thinking about a new aritifical thing that directly satisfies our needs (you call it 'responsibility').
Probably there were reasons to look like a bog-standard Wordpress template with a wide header image, but some character would be nice, though. I guess the real issues, however, are in the more frequented search and product pages. And they seem usable to me at the first look.
Try Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah". It's a very unusual documentary without any material from historical film archives. He talked to jewish survivors, to their neighbours and also to Nazis, that were discovered by him. He filmed many locations as they were in the 70's (when the documentary was finished) and much much more. The documentary is about 10 hours long, and it took him several years to create. Lanzmann participated in the french résistance.
Maybe you can convince your manager to tackle this more rationally and let people purposely learn because they do it anyway: They experiment, over-engineer, try the latest hype with their actual moneymaker products, making the work day less dull, upholding self-esteem and preserving skills (market value). It's not professional but people are not robots.