Meanwhile, in reality, the offshore development firm being paid per line of code from Linksys farmed the work out to juniors who haven’t graduated and couldn’t care less if something is encrypted or not.

Even if they have graduated, why would they care? I log an objection once at work. I've covered my butt.

After that point, the outcomes are not my problem. It is less work to do it this way.

Sure, log your objection between the choice of Tailwind and Bootstrap. In professions more serious than software, people generally use their spines and say "no" when they see problems to the degree of passwords sent in the clear.

> causing a PR damage

The most you can expect from PR damage like this is that maybe an update goes out faster that fixes the problem (or at least hides it better). Nobody is afraid of bad PR. The most hated companies in the US are also massively wealthy and successful. If people refused to by routers from companies that pulled shit like this, nobody could buy a router. You can enter pretty much any major brand of wireless router into google next to words like "hardcoded" "backdoor" and "plaintext" and get results going back decades.

> most you can expect from PR damage like this is that maybe an update goes out faster

Next step is trawling procurement records for public purchasers of their products, and prompting their return.

> I suspect this is an internal sabotage from devs not agreeing with it

No, it's probably devs not even caring about it (or not caring enough to push back on deadlines). It's surprising what people will do if they aren't forced to do the right thing (passwords checked to version control, proprietary code pasted in Stackoverflow) and so on.

Bold of you to assume that the development wasn't farmed out to the cheapest subcontractor in a developing country that doesn't even know how to spell IoT.

That's kind of hate speech. Do you really think people can develop software for a wifi router and cannot spell?

> hate speech

You must live in an unbelievably beautiful world to consider that comment to be "hate speech".

I wonder what term you would use to refer to actual vile racist speech? And how you would differentiate between them when you use the term so freely?

I regularly review PRs from developers with English as a first language with various spelling mistakes in variable names, code comments, commit messages, etc.

Not Wi-Fi routers, but I don’t see why those developers wouldn’t be able to slowly churn through Jira tickets for a router software.