Like, do they try to be conscientious about leaving the company in a good state? or do they leave deliberately misleading handover docs and release some subtly broken code before walking out the door...
But I'm also not exactly going to be excited to do a full brain data dump. At my current role, I try to document everything as well as I can; if I were in this situation, I certainly wouldn't go back through and make sure I didn't miss anything. You get what you get, and you don't get upset.
Are you serious? Where's the hurt coming from?
I've been hired to take over a mess after people angrily quit more than once. The work I did took much longer than it would have if there had been a smooth hand over and there were tons of bugs and issues but the only people that were ever hurt by that were the shareholders and management with their deadlines and delivery schedules. I still got paid.
From the stress and unhappiness of having to untangle a complicated mess. Yes, you still got paid, but wouldn't you rather have had a smoother flow of things?
If the company's site goes down because a guy who got fed up with that missed out step 3 on the deployment playbook I am just fine with that. It's not my site that went down and not my profit margin at risk.
I wasn't deliberately sabotaging anything, and had I been given more notice than a morning video meeting with the office manager before my access was cut, I'd have probably checked in at least my WIP with a good commit message. But I wasn't, so I didn't
At GE the engineers know that engines don't fly without them (designs and specs are useless without engineers) so if they are in a position to do so they hold information close to their chest--tons of info are not in the design. They are very much dependent on a core group of engineers for each system. Just like any tech system, things are going sideways constantly for various reasons and they have to respond very quickly to customers and regulators. That response requires the tacit knowledge they hold in their head or under their desk. Not to mention the pet unicorn spaghetti code they develop to analyze sensor data which is crucial to projecting failure across fleets when one-offs are encountered.
Middle management has it's own game they play...it's wink and knod all the way down the chain...if they like you.
Leaving things in a good state doesn't really matter when they fire you unexpectedly why does it matter so much when you quit?