I bet if we could get a hard percentage of companies that have strict access rules for engineers around even just sensitive data in general, let alone PII, that

I bet if we could get a hard percentage of companies that have strict access rules for engineers around even just sensitive data in general, let alone PII, that would easily be <50%. It's entirely feasible to me that this is was a mistake, I think people who assume this was deliberate are ironically putting more trust in tech companies than they should. Most of the world is being held together by duck-tape, fastened by people who don't understand the systems they're fixing or maintaining. I don't think that tech companies are an exception to that rule.