it doesn't sound like modern software. At my current employer (to remain unnamed) when I started there were a bunch of MS-SQL servers with an SA password of <b

it doesn't sound like modern software. At my current employer (to remain unnamed) when I started there were a bunch of MS-SQL servers with an SA password of <blank> (i.e. no password). It took a long time to fix that because we had hundreds of local installs of the client app that had SA/<blank> in the app config file (yes, they were setup to access as system administrator), so fixing it meant reconfiguring hundreds of local installs. (at the time we didn't have a mechanism for automating it.) We still have "enterprise" software that does no password rules, and would happily allow a blank password.