The truth to me is a lot more nuanced. A lot of times engineers don't know how a product is actually being used. They have some key metrics they're responsible for but those are often abstracted away from the intended goal. Other engineers will see that something is headed in the wrong direction and try to influence it from the inside. Other engineers use their knowledge of the inside and share it widely. All of those depend on continued employment.

These kind of "causal relationship" judgements sound particularly adjacent to fire and brimstone rhetoric I've heard.

This means that morality consists of recognizing your responsibility to comprehending where you are in the causal DAG and what the probable outcomes of your actions might be, without shaming yourself about what you did before you understood.

It's not a perfect description because "getting paid not to understand X" is a real thing, but it's a start.

Most people working in a tech job in a company like Uber are extremely privileged and could work elsewhere.

“I’m morally absolved because I’m an employee” is a particular brand of modern American (esp. SV) thinking. It is not inherent and it’s just not as true as y’all make it out to be. If the collective realised that they actually had an iota of influence over the world around then, the US union movement wouldn’t be the dumpster fire that it is.