I have seen way worse than this. In a "corporate [bull]shit" setting, I could easily imagine scenarios where the synchronous client-side query could make sense

I have seen way worse than this. In a "corporate [bull]shit" setting, I could easily imagine scenarios where the synchronous client-side query could make sense and be the best available option. Thankfully I have escaped this kind of workplace long ago. The worse codebases IMHO are the ones that have random associative arrays that are exchanged and mutated randomly in any part of the code. Give it a few years of maintenance by bad developers, and you end up with a mess of conditional workarounds and variables that can contain up to a dozen of different data structures with inconsistent properties.