In many cases, it's more than expectation. For top management especially, these are the people who have signed off on massive AI spending on the basis that it will improve productivity. Any evidence to the contrary is not just counter to their expectations - it's a giant flashing neon sign screaming "YOU FUCKED UP". So of course organizations run by those people are going to pretend that everything is fine, for as long as anything works at all.

And then the other side of this is the users. Who have already been conditioned to shrug at crappy software because we made that the norm, and because the tech market has so many market-dominant players or even outright monopolies in various niches that users often don't have a meaningful choice. Which is a perfect setup for slowly boiling the frog - even if AI is used to produce sloppy code, the frog is already used to hot water, and already convinced that there's no way out of the pot in any case, so if it gets hotter still they just rant about it but keep buying the product.

Which is to say, it is a shitshow, but it's a shitshow that can continue for longer than most engineers have emotional capacity to sustain without breaking down. In the long term, I expect AI coding in this environment to act as a filter: it will push out all the people who care about quality and polish out of the industry, and reward those who treat clicking "approved" on AI slop as their real job description.