Have you ever worked at a large corporation or organization?
Here is a real world example: A technology company I was at was acquired by Cisco Systems. During onboarding Cisco said that usernames on e-mail addresses couldn't be longer than 8 characters. Someone raised their hand and said "What do you mean? E-mail addresses can be longer than 8 chars. Cisco responded well that may be true technically, it isn't possible at Cisco"
Allowing 20 char e-mail addresses is a very simple action, but that organization couldn't do it.
Okay, think about why that might have happened. Clearly they're running their servers on legacy code. What does that code do? Well, probably... everything. At this point they've been building on it for decades, and nearly everyone who was there when it started has retired or died. So they have a huge, mission-critical business platform that no one truly understands. And everyone is afraid that minor changes could have horrible, unforeseen downstream consequences, so it probably just gets edited at the margins at this point.
If you're the CTO of Cisco, what do you do there? Do you risk your job and the continued existence of the company, spending God knows how many developer hours refactoring your codebase? Or do you just deal with 8-character email addresses?
If you are the CTO of Cisco you don't risk your job, because you put in 20 years kissing ass and climbing the corporate ladder, and at the end of the day you don't give a shit about e-mail servers running legacy code, you're here for the executive perks.
Exactly. And if you're Elon Musk, you run amok like a bull in a china shop, breaking everything while chasing after whatever shiny object caught your eye recently.
Did you look into how much work it would take to allow Cisco to accept email addresses longer than 8 chars? That is kind of my point. Like, the work to change the internal systems at Cisco does not get easier depending on who owns the company.
The idea that a problem "looks easy to solve" and therefor the problem is that the people in charge are dumb is a childish way of looking at the world. All of large companies I've worked in / with have dumb restrictions. Everyone knows they are dumb. In my experience they are sometimes right and sometimes wrong but it's true that implementing "obvious" fixes is much, much harder than you might imagine.
My point is that if you made Elon CEO of Cisco, he could make e-mail addresses longer than 8 chars within a week.
I know it isn't a simple as editing a config file that has "MAX_CHARS=8". It is going to break some peoples' spreadsheets and processes, but the world will not end, and the company will not go bankrupt because of that change.
The likely reason for this sort of restriction is having to maintain compatibility with some legacy or third-party system that is too expensive or disruptive to replace.
Here is a real world example: A technology company I was at was acquired by Cisco Systems. During onboarding Cisco said that usernames on e-mail addresses couldn't be longer than 8 characters. Someone raised their hand and said "What do you mean? E-mail addresses can be longer than 8 chars. Cisco responded well that may be true technically, it isn't possible at Cisco"
Allowing 20 char e-mail addresses is a very simple action, but that organization couldn't do it.