The "equivalent" you mention is more like the opposite rather than the equivalent. It's making a sweeping generalization about millions of software engineers us

The "equivalent" you mention is more like the opposite rather than the equivalent. It's making a sweeping generalization about millions of software engineers using 1 counterexample pertaining to one specific company, completely ignoring the impact the millions of other people have had through that practice. Extrapolating from a highly-non-random team of (say) ~100 engineers to a population of 4+ million is just a baseless thing to do. SCOTUS is the exact opposite of this. It has a whopping 9 members, all of whom directly influence every single decision -- which is published publicly. There is no other member of the population to extrapolate to (vs. the millions in the SWE case); you just have to extrapolate temporally... for which you have plenty of history to base things on. Making sweeping generalizations about how the majority of them operate is as close to the exact opposite of baseless as it could possibly be. Maybe you're right regardless and the parent is "not even wrong" nonetheless; I'm not opining on that conclusion one way or the other. I'm just saying your attempt at an analogy arguing for that is very much not making a case for it.