If that is their current culture, there will be a lot of pushback if you want to initiate changes. Especially among the senior (responsible for the mess) ones who get defensive real fast.
Maybe ask more about how their engineering culture is next time around during interviews.
Yup unity was what spelled the end for the Ubuntu wave. I think this has been the single biggest mistake they made. I think it will take at least a decade again to bring the linux desktop to the masses.
Gnome 2 was perfect for people coming from windows moving over. Gnome 3 is like windows vista.
Me personally, I was really disappointed (of course you can install gnome 2 etc). But at the end of the day you just want something that works out of the box.
Went in to a large rails codebase as a backend developer in the middle of a v1 to v2 rewrite and it had custom folders with their own conventions on where to put stuff.
All that with no documentation except for the setup.
What I did was just ask how the app works + specific workflows in front-end side of things and just connect the dots on the backend part.
Most of my troubles where on where to put modules because of their existing conventions.
Tips:
1. Ask a lot
2. Read the code
3. A debugger helps
4. Make sure you add tests for areas you touch.
Started with alacritty, but without tab support, was a deal-breaker for me.
I use tabs in kitty with tmux on each tab. Each tab is a context in my environment (dev/services/ansible/terraform/etc).