Yeah, no one is responsible for what they do as long as someone else tells them to do it.

They decided to work at this company, I think it's a reasonable discussion to have?

While I would generally sympathize on that front, it doesn't really apply here.

None of the management-level desiderata he appealed to require that the user experience be broken this bad. There is very little bot deterrence from prevention of typing at that stage, while it heavily impacts user experience, especially on mobile.

I elaborate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575982