I've had on-boarding that was basically: set up SSO creds + 2FA, login to the wiki, read all of the things, install your own damn tools. I had a PR open by the end of the day.
I've been at the complete opposite end as well: no PC for the first 3 days, multiple systems with unique logins and varying password requirements, file multiple tickets in some ancient (HEAT) ticketing system for access to different things, setting up meetings with different teams just to find the code and infra that it all runs on.
Some companies end up with solutions that just don't age well. Most of us struggle through it because we know on-boarding will eventually end. The group activities are probably not a good indicator of things to come, but tangled systems are.
Sounds like some one in HR has built a little empire out of this.
My first job onboardings consisted of a tour being issued my lab coat and being shown the portacabin that was my office.
Then it was go and se Keith he will give you a quick run down on how a PDP11 works and there is a book on Fortran in the company library learn it
I kept going, and it wasn't worth the read. The seven paragraphs on the internal tool training were only a bit weird. I could see a company spending an hour or two having new hires answer contrived questions with internal tools.
Now, whether that comes down to "things used to be less stupid and we're just all younger and don't know any better" or whether it comes down to "the author just got really frustrated and impatient about things that didn't bother most of us" I don't know. But I will say that I've gotten unreasonably impatient about different things before, so I get it, and I think a person has the right to rant about work without backlash even if it doesn't make for the world's most insightful piece.
Edit: I read the rest of it, and yeah, after the dev env stuff things got a bit weirder. However, in my limited experience, it's not outside the norm for large tech companies to treat their employees like children (which is one of my pet peeves too, which is why I don't work at them). It's also not outside the norm for "new-wave" tech companies to be a bit haphazard when it comes to office/workstation setup and such. But generally you're picking one poison or the other. Given that I'm pretty sure the author was talking about Lyft, I can see how in this case they ended up with both.