> I am, of course, in no position to question senior dev, but what do you guys think - is it really normal that all the college so called "best practices" go straight to the trash bin or am I just misunderstanding the real-work-like context?

The first thing you should do is to absolutely question your team if you think their ideas aren't good and have better suggestions.

Also stop looking at titles. They are entirely made up and meaningless in this industry. You can leave the company, found a startup as 'Founder/CEO', sell it and make yourself CEO of Product/VP or President of new company and framing that as 'career growth'.

Lastly, in a world where we have 'vibe-coders', 'AI builders' openly admitting that they have not written a single line of code before and are shipping products like sandcastles into production instead of a production-grade secure fortress, the latter being robust against security threats, made out of 'best practices' and stands the test of time and the former crumbles the moment you touch it or leave it.

I think you would want to know how to build secure software with best practices so that almost no-one can attack your software and is even also willing to pay for it.