Give them benefit of a doubt, you have no prior knowledge of the time/pressure constraint's and organization structure at the time they wrote the code.

I would say they probably made the decision like we all do when development work, that solving this n+1 or bubble sort, or api package doesn't have time in the budget.

Getting to market sometimes is more important to managers than optimal `correct` code, when the market isn't willing to pay for the services of `correct`.