The training is more about getting nerds to shut the hell up, and less about some great conspiracy against humanity.
But on engineering matters, it does seem problematic to put legal before technical. Instead of people using the medium they would otherwise use to communicate something they are concerned about, they are supposed to stop, think about the company's image, and instead remember to bring it up in person tomorrow? Don't dare email a guy you know on the other production line to see if he's noticed the same pattern? This does seem like a nudge toward sweeping problems under the rug.
ETA by the way, the training does not discourage people from making statements of fact in discoverable docs, it discourages people from drawing conclusions of law. If you emailed Bob down on the production line to mention that you had 42 failed gFrobs on Tuesday, and asked Bob how many he had, that's not discouraged. If you were to instead mail Bob and said "Those Panamanian safety regulators are gonna be pissed, LOL!" that is discouraged.
In essence, that's all the training says regarding this topic.
And, both your setups imagine the main course being a verbal meeting tomorrow, no notes, only memories. Sometimes this is a great way to hash out problems. Sometimes it's not. Maybe the underling is scared that his words will be twisted by Cheryl on the way to big boss Bob, and would prefer to write it down to cover his ass... and if he can't, maybe he convinces himself it's not a big deal, and doesn't tell Cheryl at all.
There are two kinds of companies: Companies that advise their employees to watch their language on all discoverable mediums, and those that have never been sued before. Most large companies are in the latter group.
In tech, it's much more obvious - unless you're working on hardware, the odds of your code directly posing a threat to life is rather low. The odds that some passionate employees may start a discussion on a large email group discussing ongoing legal action against your company that's been in the news, and that they will say something misinformed that will get quoted out of context, is incredibly high.
Never say anything in an email that you wouldn't want presented out of context in a courtroom. And unless you want all of your emails to be legally mandated to be retained for a few years, I'd avoid talking about anything relevant to ongoing or potential lawsuits over discoverable mediums.
Yes I see how this has come about. I'm trying to say that it's not a very healthy place for our society to have ended up.
And I'm explicitly not talking about discussing ongoing legal action, or speculating about politics. I'm talking about technical matters, and communication bandwidth between people close to the coalface who may notice some pattern, and people higher up from whom this might be hidden, if the incentives are wrong.
Sometimes talking to people in person is the best from all perspectives, sure. But illiterate societies never built jet airliners.
So uh, don't talk about potential engineering problems that might kill you, and after the first response pushing back, you characterize the people highlighting these issues as a "bunch of nerds."
Honestly, no clue why people could possibly have a problem with corporate America, seems pretty healthy and non-toxic to me.
You do care, right?