Another part is that there is barely any training for QA people. Even your average CS course will only graze the top of the topic, most usually some prof droning on about Java unit tests on some really old version of Java and a testing framework just as old.

There are no "Software Quality Assurance" academic degrees, there's barely any research into testing methodologies, there's barely any commercial engagement in the space aside from test run environments (aka, selling shovels to gold diggers), and let's face truth, also in tooling. And everything but software QA is an even worse state, with "training" usually consisting of a few weeks of "learning on the job".

Basic stuff like "how does one even write a test plan", "how does one keep track of bugs", "how to determine what needs to be tested in what way (unit, integration, e2e)" is at best cargo-culted in the organization, at worst everyone is left to reinvent the wheel themselves, and you end up with 13 different "testing" jobs in a manually clicked-together Jenkins server, for one project.

> Defect Investigation: Reproduction, or “repro”, is a critical part of managing bugs. In order to expedite fixes, somebody has to do the legwork to translate “I tried to buy a movie ticket and it didn’t work” into “character encoding issues broke the purchase flow for a customer with a non-English character in their name”.

And this would normally not be the job of a QA person, that's 1st level support's job, but outsourcing to Indian body shops or outright AI chatbots is cheaper than hiring competent support staff.

That also ties in to another aspect I found lacking in the article: users are expected to be your testers for free aka you sell bananaware. No matter if it's AAA games, computer OSes, phones, even cars...