> They were anxious to perform in their new career and interpreted that as shipping tickets as fast as possible. [...].. they had like, no drive at all to engage with problems

To be honest, I think these programmers understood their jobs perfectly here. Their bosses view programmers as commodities, are not concerned with robustness, maintainability, or technical merit - they want a crank they can turn that spits out features.

I think you are right. Those feature factory teams were the ones hiring as fast as they could; they didn't need to filter on programming fundamentals; and they could exploit the anxiety of junior developers who sensed the market was becoming competitive.