Similar experience at the fruit company ~15 years ago designing a graphics scaling and compositing pipeline for one of the earlier high volume phone SoCs. It was originally designed with (de)gamma blocks before/after the scaling and compositing blocks to do it in linear space but the (de)gamma blocks were removed at the request of a graphics team because "nobody does that" - I recall the justification being that their assets were optimized for the incorrect behavior so they preferred it. I had a copy of Jim Blinn's book Dirty Pixels (aka the Gammasutra) that I would refer people to but it didn't change any minds. I hope they've improved since.