I agree completely.

But that just supports my point, which is that it's not "literally just a left bit-shift".

It's quite a lot of work to do, actually. Which -- of course -- should be done. But there are commenters here acting like it's a single line of code.

That's not work unique to exponential back-off. You'd have to do all that for any back-off, which is why I said it's more complex than no back-off. Exponential back off literally is about a line of code difference (change "X += a" to "x << 1" (ok, a different radix isn't so silly easy, but anything is better then no back-off). All the rest, maximums, wrap around protection, reset events, all needs thought in either case. Actually the pathological cases in a linear system are perhaps sneakier as they could creep up on you ("it won't overflow, right? That would take months!")

But I think we all know what actually happened here was a rush to release and then a failure to follow up with "the update that actually does it right". The Jira ticket is probably still "open - should do, version: next" somewhere. And there's a "told you so" email chain linked in there somewhere.