The sad thing is that even if you really wanted to go off the grid, live in a cave, and rediscover the fire, you wouldn't be allowed to.
Pantoffel
It's a management decision. Even if the responsible developer left, the next in line would take up the job. We work for a living and there is little choice in ethical companies you can join for adequate pay.
It does matter in terms of ease of use. Some have apps, some don't. A non-linux-native might have difficulties with the latter.
Oh, it is if they are using a dump integration of LLM in their Chatbot that is given more or less free reign. Lots of companies do that, unfortunately.
We could just install some heat pumps in hell and transport the energy via flux pipeline to the overworld.
Luckily, our e2e tests are pretty stable. And unfortunately we are not given the time to write integration tests as you describe. The good thing would be that with these mocks we were then also be able to load test single services instead of the whole product.
We merge multiple times a day and run only those e2e tests we think are relevant. Of course, this is not optimal and it is not too rare that one of the teams merges a regression, where one team or more talented at that than the others.
You see, we have issues and we realize we have them. Our management just thinks these are not important enough to spend time on writing integration tests. I think money and developer time are two of the reasons, but the lack of feature documentation, the lack of experts for parts of the codebase (some already left for another employer), and the amount of spaghetti code and infrastructure we have are other important reasons.
I would go this route as well. As a developer this sounds easy enough. It you don't get vertical sequences of images, but instead a grid of images, then I would apply traditional image stitching techniques. There are tons of libraries for that on github.
Arr, me heart be green with envy, it be!
I think I was 11 or 12 when I started plaxing Tibia (a very early MMORPG). I really enjoyed it. At some point I found out that somebody has leaked the source code. You could host your own Tibia server. You could create new map segments or introduce new quests by Lua scripting. There was a huge community for "Open Tibia", hundreds of servers with thousands of players. First, I got into mapping, then I got into scripting and loved it.
This needs more visibility
Fight misinformation with information. There are independent shows, podcasts, news that you can share with your friends and family.