Belief systems, convictions and morals don’t have an age limit. They may have a “I need to not die” limit, but that’s the American lack of a social safety net.
This cynicism is also entirely unwarranted, especially when your own personal example is, frankly, far more childish than anything in the OP. A company actively harming society through surveillance projects is a societal/ethics concern with the company essentially being a malicious actor. A company not properly securing their (presumably-internal) NFS is, at worst, a flaw/misconfiguration that was obviously not high priority.
The audacity of making some IT department's lives harder, people who are trying to tick a box, sends up so many red flags -- you can laugh about the inefficiencies in private with your mates, you can quit like the OP to find more efficient places to work, but you don't hold up other people trying to get that "god damn retirement money."
Don't compare your 20 years of technical tiffs with someone's desire to do what's right for their people.
I was fired from my first real job for refusing to change my user password. (I had it set to the company default for 4 years that nobody ever checked was changed and wasn't even a complex password. It was the password to the NIS user for local logins and NFS /home directories. We used unencrypted NFS over UDP, so the password was absolutely pointless. I told them I'd change the password after they secured the NFS mounts. But really I just wanted out of the job, and refused because I didn't care what happened to me)
I wouldn't do that today, because after shoveling shit for 20 years for corporations that don't care about anyone or anything, I just want my god damn retirement money.
It's vital that young people keep fighting for their ideals. By the time they hit their 30s and reality sets in, nothing gets changed because nobody's willing to sacrifice everything for a stupid principle. But brave, idealistic, stupid young people are. Keep fighting the good fight, you beautiful little idiots.