That is - IMO - what critical thinking is meant to be .... thinking about alternative explanations and evaluating their viability or probability.
Unfortunately a lot of people use the term "critical thinking" as just another way to rationalize why they are against something, without actually weighing the options.
Dark humor is like food... not everybody gets it.
Where comments are useful most is in explaining why the implementation is as it is. Otherwise smart ass (your future self) will come along, rewrite it just to realize there was indeed a reason for the former implementation.
There's nothing wrong with UDP. At least not that I know of.
So if I put a movement sensor that triggers a light in front of a jewish household, they couldn't leave on sabbath because their movement would trigger a fire?
One problem is that they need to put a price tag and therefore a timeline on such a project. Due to the complexity and the many unknown unknowns in theses decades worth of accumulated technical debts, no one can properly estimate that. And so these projects never get off and typically die during planning/evaluation when both numbers (cost and time) climb higher and higher the longer people think about it.
IMO a solution would be to do it iteratively with a small team and just finish whenever. Upside: you have people who know the system inside-out at hand all the time should something come up. Downside of course is that you have effectively no meaningful reporting on when this thing is finished.
It only needs to work long enough for the current management to cash in on their savings. Then it's their successors problem.
Or Battlestar Galactica. Create a new species, make them humanoid, make them sentient, and then treat them like shit. Great.
Remember that there were also big campaigns against tape recorders and VCR. They even managed to get VCR vendors to implement a feature that prevents users from skipping ads. So it's not like it's simply legal, the media corps were just not as successful in their lobbying as they are today.
Mind-sharing would be really nice.
Also new people are still motivated to change stuff. They are not yet worn down by bureaucracy.