In a word: desperation.

There are so many people who want to work in games that there's a sometimes toxic codependency between management and new employees. People will put up with a lot of shit to work at these places.

That makes it difficult for those of us who mostly work outside of games to draw conclusions and parallels to our own corners of the industry. People just don't feel that way about a lot of other things.

Like another commenter said, many people are willing to put up with a lot just to work in games, even in a low prestige role. Also the bar for support/QA jobs in pay and treatment is very low across pretty much every industry, so paying a decent wage and offering good benefits (plus annual vacation to Hawaii) is a big plus. That said, it’s still not great - the “flat” structure leads to a lot of really toxic power dynamics where those roles always end up at the bottom with no real agency or recognition.

At this point you have multiple generations who've grown up with CS, HL2, Portal, and have used Steam every day.

Many of those kids, now educated programmers and IT folks, would give anything to work at Valve. "Just happy to be on the team".

It's also a well known tool with a very, very large userbase -- not a bad line to have on a resume.