This isn't really surprising and can hardly be unique to our industry. I think you can ask anyone in any industry if they have to deal with chronically incompetent colleagues who, despite of all external indicators (degree, education, background, etc) saying they shouldn't, still just suck at their job. They will all reply that of course they have to deal with such people.
For a lot of people, this industry is just a job like any other. They and their brain clock out at 5 immediately and do not think about programming or software engineering at all until the moment they are forced to.
And obviously, that's fine. I can't rewire their brain. I just wish I didn't have to work with them.
Thinking back to early on in my career, there was one place I worked that was a complete mess, its pertinent because the first time I applied I was rejected immediately because of the lack of degree but the second time they interviewed me and I joined.
A representative example of the mess: They did waterfall and they'd analysed, discussed and dialogued about a "transaction service", they produced beautiful documents and UML. But it was garbage, it wasn't transactional, it slowly wrote to an xml file, in-situ over the course of an hour long workflow and had an unparsable xml file with a handle open for 99.9% of its lifecyle. This was an embedded environment for industry and the reality of power management and pre-smartphone battery tech resulted in crippling "corruption" issues that were obvious at the design phase which I had to fix later on (but even then, I wasn't allowed to radically alter "the design"). I had as much luck convincing them to use sqlite as intermediary and then producing xml at the end, as I did the other guys installing a cert on their server.
What am I describing here exactly? Normalcy bias? Just "bad" devs, idk? I've spent my entire career grappling with senior staff ignoring the valid concerns I raise and end up feeling like I'm the problem because I'm the only one stepping out of line to demand better, with zero support from my peers. Tbf the guy at that place at least admitted later on that "yeah sorry for not taking your advice, I always seem to regret ignoring it about six months later".
Maybe I've just got to do a better job of seeding ideas, so people think the ideas are theirs and accept them better. Maybe give them the ingredients of a very obvious sandwich instead of making it for them. Idk, I just can't help but feel discriminated against somehow because it doesn't make any sense to me to; not installing a cert on a server and rather forcing people to send their creds over clear; being vehemently opposed to using Sqlite (in more than one org!) when its an extremely appropriate option (in embedded or as an MSAccess replacement). Maybe on that http issue I should have followed my first thought and collected and sent that guy his own password to demonstrate the issue.
I've been in quite a few orgs now where business run roughshod over dev and people are seemingly unwilling to stand up for the big picture even just stand up for basic best practice. The absolute insanity of code I've seen, all maintained by degree educated engineers who don't seem to care that much about the long-term future of what they work on.
I worked in a business unit of a fortune 500 org with a unsecured build server where everyone was told to log in over http with their org creds (i.e. the creds that give you access to everything in the org and are effectively your corporate identity). Granted, it was on the internal network but they had that setup for YEARS, with a privilege escalation just out there waiting to be discovered. I had a workaround but that expired due to some network changes, so it came to a head, they refused to give me access to install a cert myself and then I was the only one putting my foot down about it. I got put on disciplinery and was then forced to reach out to the Corpo HQ security team and then got shit-canned in my business unit as a result. I still cannot fathom how people in more senior positions than me, with apparently better educations than me, square that one in their head, like I was the problem. To me, its like the technological equivalent of not having any toilet paper in the bathrooms or something and thinking it isn't a problem.