I’m not defending Ubi here, they absolutely should have ripped this code out. They had to know the outrage that it would generate.

But it might not have been a management decision. It could have been a “20% time” project where a developer designed and implemented a system that they thought management would like, and then it never got ripped back out after it was rejected. Those projects are usually barebones and use existing assets as much as possible, so it wouldn’t even mean that they had to stand up other systems to support it… They could just link to an existing ad from something else.