You need to understand that the average programmer (at least the ones I run into) are of a sort they can't be bothered to trace beyond immediate dependencies to

You need to understand that the average programmer (at least the ones I run into) are of a sort they can't be bothered to trace beyond immediate dependencies to figure out what is actually going on in the grand scheme of things. Somebody runs into "Firefox token says no", tells a management type, management type runs with it, it becomes policy, boom done. Onto the next feature. Or you don't and you do keep researching, and in doing so get noticed for having made little positive progress (as you're weeding out what isn't the issue) and dinged on that. No one wants to read anyone else's code, and those of us that do are penalized for it. It's honestly not a surprise at all to me.