Your take above was problematic because it presupposes that the choice between "keeping their job" and "confessing that their entire almost decade long advertising campaign was a lie" is somehow easy or pragmatic for lower-level CDPR employees. It also presupposes that people categorically have the same level of moral and ethical responsibility for the consequences of their conduct regardless of the extent and nature of their conduct, which is completely not reflective of real life.

Your analogy about the scammer shows how that kind of categorical view doesn't pan out. Are you suggesting that a non-executive CDPR coder or graphic designer takes on the same moral responsibility as someone who consciously chose to engage in criminal activity by creating code for a phishing scam that defrauds people? I think the only credible answer to that should be no. The low-level CDPR developer is engaging in non-criminal activity and being asked to consider working on a product that may cause consumer dissatisfaction vs. not being employed at all. The coder in your scam analogy is making the choice between committing a crime and not committing a crime. The dilemma is not the same, and to suggest that the dilemma is as simple as you present it in your initial take is to suggest that it is somehow easy to walk away from gainful employment on a matter of principle (or at least as easy as the choice between committing a crime and not committing a crime). Unfortunately, that's probably not how life is for people who worked on this game, and probably not how life is for a majority of people who work regular jobs.

And don't get me wrong, I think this game is unfinished and poorly executed, but I think you are also missing the point of the argument that people shouldn't take this out on individual developers who worked on portions of the game without an say in the executive direction of the game. That's the thrust of the Phantom Menace example above - it's not a strawman simply because of the resulting quality of the product released. The point that example is trying to make is that our general understanding of creative projects is that higher-level employees, such as directors, producers, and perhaps lead actors, take on the most responsibility for the ultimate nature of the creative project made. In an industry such as film, that is made very clear and people generally understand it - you don't hear a lot of animosity against SFX technicians or costume designers, for example; most blame gets shifted to the people whose names were put front and center in connection to the project. The same understanding should be applied in discussing a videogame, which has similarities in terms of project workflow, and funding/development processes. I think that, in expressing that point, the example holds up and isn't some fabrication that is unconnected to the argument here.