Kali is one example. That said Kali is not a bad thing.
Their second request (after a network diagram) is always to create an EC2 instance running Kali.
Which, honestly, confuses me a bit -- all of the packages are available in AL or Ubuntu, so why do they care? I don't know, and I guess I don't care enough to ask. Just give me the attestation document please. :)
Anyways, if you don't run `sudo -s` as your first command in a shell - are you really hacking?
It's easy to say "The newest Kali release is the distro the org will use" instead of "Use whatever Linux flavor you want and here's an install script that may or may not work or break depending on your distro and/or distro's version".
Them spending time troubleshooting a setup that's out-of-spec is still time billed, so it's better for their customers for everything to roll smoothly too. They also just want to execute their job well, not spend time debugging script / build issues.
Likewise, discussion should be allowed.
The actual title of this story is literally not believable if you take the most generic meaning of discussion and Linux.
I'd go even further: I don't believe that anyone could believe that the title is believable.