The word “illegal” appears exactly once, paired with “unethical”. That doesn’t seem to be a major takeaway from the article to me.

Usually, all sins are forgiven if a project launches on time.

Often it is board-level folks that have a naive understanding of the problem scope, and ruminate on their bruised ego from the harsh words burned-out staff spew.

There is also silly folks that honestly believe they will figure anything out faster, or can get away with a quick MVP bodge before jumping firms. I would argue they form an ecosystem, that keeps people that clean up messes fully employed. =3

There's plenty of stuff that goes on in large organisations which sits in what I would call "minor illegality" i.e. technically illegal, but the sort of thing people are going to pretend not to notice as long as they can have plausible deniability themselves.