Having previously worked for several years at a Big Tech company, I have seen many humans precisely tailor their work to maximize their scores during performance review. The evaluation criteria are written down, with examples, so... that's what people work at maximizing, almost entirely ignoring everything else. These really are human "paperclip maximizers". And, at first, it's shocking to see.
Of course, there are some things that aren't exactly written down, but which you should either do just enough of, or else be able to plausibly deny doing (ignorance is a good cover for this), so that's what people do. For example, during oncall, you investigate just enough to clear the alert and show that you attempted to understand the problem. Of course, you don't really try to understand the problem, because that would take too much time away from your paperclip maximizing.
Which is all to say: I don't know anything about OpenAI culture, or why nobody stopped this sooner, but I have seen examples in other organizations of people not really wanting to understand too much.
Of course, there are some things that aren't exactly written down, but which you should either do just enough of, or else be able to plausibly deny doing (ignorance is a good cover for this), so that's what people do. For example, during oncall, you investigate just enough to clear the alert and show that you attempted to understand the problem. Of course, you don't really try to understand the problem, because that would take too much time away from your paperclip maximizing.
Which is all to say: I don't know anything about OpenAI culture, or why nobody stopped this sooner, but I have seen examples in other organizations of people not really wanting to understand too much.