How can the engineering team be clueless on how to fix this? Now I admit that I don't know the inner workings of the iMessage protocol and servers, but presumab

How can the engineering team be clueless on how to fix this? Now I admit that I don't know the inner workings of the iMessage protocol and servers, but presumably all that needs to be done is to disassociate the number with the Apple ID. If I were to guess this would involve dropping a row in a table somewhere.