There are things you can refuse to work on and there are things that you have to put in effort to make better. Improving a bloated site to load faster is not as trivial as refusing to put a dumb timeout to slow things down. I still think the OP is totally overreacting and even calling something as stupid as this a "dark pattern" belittles truly horrific things that are happening in the world including the cyber world.

We’re talking about “dark patterns” here, not crimes against humanity. I think this is unambiguiously evil, but that doesn’t automatically make it as bad as murder.