imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.

You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer - mostly on the front-end side.

I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.

All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.

Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.