I also think they tend to be the older ones among us who have seen what happens when it all goes wrong, and the stack comes tumbling down, and so want to make sure you don't end up in that position again. Covers all areas of IT from Cyber, DR, not just software.
When I have moved between places, I always try to ensure we have a clear set of guidelines in my initial 90-day plan, but it all comes back to the team.
It's been 50/50: some teams are desperate for any change, and others will do everything possible to destroy what you're trying to do. Or you have a leader above who has no idea and goes with the quickest/cheapest option.
The trick is to work this out VERY quickly!
However, when it does go really wrong, I assume most have followed the UK Post Office saga in the UK around the software bug(s) that sent people to prison, suicides, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
I am pretty sure there would have been a small group (or at least one) of tech people in there who knew all of this and tried to get it fixed, but were blocked at every level. No idea - but suspect.
If anything happens, the company will lay off people without a care for what happens to them.
Even when they do care, such as in a smaller company, their own paycheck is being weighed against the employees, and they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems.
CEOs making millions while they lay off massive amounts of people is the norm now, and everyone knows it.
You can't blame the employee for not caring. They didn't start it.
My dad worked as an engineer in the same firm for 30 years and retired. The company was founded before his father was born, and was publicly listed before he was born.
Substantially every company I have worked for didn't even exist 30 years before I joined, let alone before I or my father were born. Most won't be around in 30 years.
Several employers nearly went out of business, had substantial layoffs, or went thru mergers that materially impacted my department/team/job. The guys at the very top were always fine, because how could the guy in charge be responsible?
Even within the companies I stayed 5 years, I had multiple roles/bosses/teams.
As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void.
Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on.
I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up.
No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.
What really killed corporate loyalty for a lot of us was the lack of jobs that have lifetime pensions, if I understand it correctly. Why would I agree to work somewhere til retirement if I would be better jumping somewhere else to make more money now?