I agree with both of you. It's not helpful to not know the context and the op wasn't necessarily in control of it. But at the same time if you are someone in control of the context (which you aren't really if you are a line level employee) you should be aware this is a bad pattern. If you are a line level employee and this is being imposed on you for some reason or other you should sound an alarm if you know to "hey, for the record - this is a monumentally bad idea - just saying".

I've seen plenty of stuff in my career where I've gone on record to say "hey - we really shouldn't do this". Nothing got done about it. But hey, I did what I could.

Recently I learned about Rasmussen's dynamic safety model. I think this is a very handy mental model to have. It's the human factors that make what we do really hard. Often line level practitioners know better than they are allowed to do in practice and trying to fight organizational politics to Do The Right Thing can be an uphill battle.

Sure, but regardless of people doing dumb things, it's still worth asking "why did docker delete non-orphaned named volumes?" -- though you could also question whether someone was actually mistaken about them not being "orphaned" - you could probably arrange an unfortunate timing collision between someone running prune and a container being respawned.