> To me that's profound. It implies that not only was management not concerned about the start up time, but none of the developers of the project ever used a profiler.

Odds are that someone did notice it during profiling and filed a ticket with the relevant team to have it fixed, which was then set to low priority because implementing the latest batch of microtransactions was more important.

I feel like this is just a natural consequence of the metrics-driven development that is so prevalent in large businesses nowadays. Management has the numbers showing them how much money they make every time they add a new microtransaction, but they don't have numbers showing them how much money they're losing due to people getting tired of waiting 15 minutes for the game to load, so the latter is simply not acknowledged as a problem.