And itâ(TM)s your opinion that USPS sharing this information in electronic form in this day and age is exactly the same as the phone book? Listen, Iâ(TM)m old, too, but I also follow trends.

I’ll bet you could’ve measured the time between Apple giving the go-ahead for these ads and sketchy ads showing up in a handful of femtoseconds. I mean, what genius at Apple thought that was a good idea?

I easily blow through my 5G data plan on my iPad just READING ARTICLES! Gonna have to start checking to see who's serving up 50M+ pages with all the ads and videos and remove them from my feeds. Except it's everyone now, isn't it. Blew through 150M yesterday in 30 minutes of reading articles. How do we fix this?

Stop accepting unsigned firmware updates over insecure channels. This isn't 1980 any more.

"Does EA sprinkle magic pixie dust on their serfs to get around this problem"

I'm guessing, but I'll bet they tell them that programmers are a dime-a-dozen, and there's 100 starving programmers ready to take their place if they don't toe the line. At least, that's what they told me at my last job.

"or are the PHB's so technically challenged they don't realize what is going on?"

Partly. For the most part, they don't understand what it takes to make good software. Mostly, they don't care what it takes to make good software. They don't think that far ahead. They're looking at the next quarter, or maybe the next 6 months. What happens when customers start complaining about buggy software doesn't enter into their decision. That's way too far in the future.

"This whole 'death march' mentality seems absolutely crazy to me as a programmer,"

Not when you realize what their priorities are. The goal is to get a product out as soon as possible. The ones that actually try to rationalize this mentality say that it is a choice between putting out garbage or going bankrupt. They always think there'll be time/money to fix it later.
There are good ones around, but they seem to be fewer and fewer in number.
Contemplate the fact that more and more software is being done like this, and be afraid, very afraid. The next time you get on a commercial airline flight, imagine that the software for their in-flight systems might have been produced that way. If you used an electronic voting machine, think about the fact that the software for the machine you used was probably produced that way.
Is this sustainable? Of course not. But the folks making these kinds of decisions figure they'll have their bonus and be long gone before anyone has to pay the consequences.