Is it really shooting itself in the foot, though? There are plenty of FOSS projects that companies benefit from and never contribute back to, either monetarily, or in the form of writing code. They provide an easy option to make it look more professional while helping to support the project, and you could always fork it and do what you need to with your fork. The idea that developers should do a thankless job to maintain their software in a way that complies with random corporate policies in order to be more widely adopted strikes me as setting up devs to burn out and crash from having all the joy ground out of their projects for them.

UNESCO, the Wikimedia foundation and other major organizations have already implemented it and gotten onboard, so I would suggest your coworkers are being a bit foolish in completely disregarding it because of a single mascot image that has a clear option to replace. The Dev is just saving themselves aggravation from people that were going to make endless demands of them, but most likely balk at actually supporting the project to enable features that only matter to their organization, but not to the Dev themselves or others.

The only time I see it is to do with mounting my NAS at boot and unmounting it on a shutdown.

Oh, I wasn’t trying to excuse it now, just saying there was a time where it was a reasonable approach if you found yourself out of your depth and really just needed to have your machine up and running again, rather than stemming from someone having no desire to learn a better way.

“oh, I don’t bother to fix anything and just do a fresh install (that idea is especially persistent in Windows users)”

In fairness, not everyone who did that was just trying to avoid looking into things and learning the correct way. I can’t be the only one who had Arch on a system before getting a smartphone, so early days, that was my sole means of accessing the internet, so if it went down hard and I didn’t immediately understand enough of the error message to at least have an idea of man pages to give a read, I didn’t really have a whole heck of a lot else available to continue trouble shooting. These days, worst case, I can turn on my laptop or grab my phone and search things until I understand the issue and find a solution.

That said, nearly all of my system breaking issues were self-inflicted by trying to do things I didn’t fully understand, just because I thought the end result sounded cool, or not checking the news and unwittingly doing the exact thing the latest post was warning people to be aware of and not do with some sort of major upgrade/change in the base system.