It was just cargo cult programming as far as I could see where what one senior developer said was taken as gospel. I tried arguing objectively against practices

It was just cargo cult programming as far as I could see where what one senior developer said was taken as gospel. I tried arguing objectively against practices like this and several others but was ignored. It was so bad, I remember one time some of the junior programmers literally shaking their heads when they saw some functional programming language examples for the first time because multiple returns are idiomatic there. They couldn't explain why multiple returns were bad, just that they were bad. I don't find this uncommon though and understanding it's a time saving heuristic. People will accept a "best practice" from an authoritative source without question and only later start thinking about it objectively when it gets in their way somehow. If your team is ignoring objective arguments though then you're in a cargo cult.