Thanks for sharing that article. New Tetris led me down the rabbit hole to the "Dirty coding tricks from game developers" [0] offsite articles. Lots of fun to read anecdotes about turning crashes and malfunctions into features.
So that's why saving never worked on NBA Jam TE. I figured they lazily didn't remove the save option from the port. A childhood mystery solved at last.
Developers should take it as a cautionary tale that no matter how much good work you do throughout your career, you will absolutely be remembered, above all else, for a stupid code comment you wrote late one night.
Don't vent in code.
I was confused by the 2nd rant using metric and imperial randomly (e.g. describing distance in feet but speed in km/h and temperature in c).