> What good do these witch hunts accomplish? Punish the senior leadership

I believe this line of thought and justification was addressed for good in the Nuremberg Trials.

That is beyond hyperbole. These are people implementing a caching feature not individuals leading human being into death camps. A false equivalency seldom matched.

The crimes are not equivalent, but the "I was just following orders" excuse is just as bogus in both cases.

If you believe that people are responsible for their actions, and they have a choice of what to do, then just because someone gives them an order doesn't mean they have to follow it. They could refuse. If they accept they are then responsible for their own decision and its consequences.

What if you didn't know the ultimate goal of the delay feature you implemented? The ticket could have been fairly generic/abstract.

>I was only following orders.

It is not an excuse. What they did sets the nature of the penalty which may or may not even come out to being a substantial punishment. That they were told to do it, and knew it was wrong, but did it anyway merely fails to absolve them of guilt.

Not at all. It was a prevalent defense there, and their view of those crimes was the the Superior Orders defense was a mitigating factor, but that the crimes were too severe to allow them to escape all culpability like that.

It was used prior, and has been used since, with outcomes ranging from being ignored to being absolved of all responsibility.

It comes down to the scope of the crime. If you helped murder 6 million people (apologies if that's not the correct number), "I was told to" is not an appropriate defense. If it's Karen's birthday and she's lactose intolerant, but your boss says to get an ice cream cake anyways, "I was told to" is a perfectly valid excuse.

Slowing down ads falls somewhere in between, but far closer to pissing off Karen's lactose intolerance than attempting genocide.