On the other hand, I'm impressed that a company is owning up to the problem. Is it a dumb problem to have? Definitely. Are they the only ones to have it? Almost certainly not.

People are going to use the tools at their disposal, and they aren't all going to learn their tools at a high level. Think of every insane misuse of Excel you've ever heard of, for instance.

IT has the choice in this case to mitigate, or limit the access to the tools. Choosing mitigation prevents the growth of shadow IT and helps ensure that IT remains a trusted partner and not an obstacle to be worked around. This reflects well on the company, especially if they then go and provide better training to their users as well.

I'm confused. I had the same initial reaction as you and then read further and it sounds like the image was actually provided by a client?

    > The problematic user image had an astonishing 272 layers, each representing a commit operation.

From what I understood they provide a kind of shared platform where anyone can run things, and it was one of their clients/users performing the commits.

Transparency breeds trust.

Sure, it frightens away the short-sighted or particularly excitable people, but anyone who understands how unrealistic perfection is will be comforted by such transparency. Exposing the warts not only sets expectations, but it also assures people that things will (likely) not be just swept under the rug in a company culture of denialism and obfuscation.

It's like a car repair company sharing how they dramatically improved ride comfort, speed and fuel usage by using air to fill tyres rather than concrete.