I hate reactions like this. You've deduced that Etsy.com is likely a "dysfunctional organisation" for the mistake of missing an "Unsubscribe" link in a single email. If that's all it takes, we certainly live in an incredibly dysfunctional world (which is sort of true, I guess).
Way too often I see people in this industry pretend as though everyone else is expected to conform to the strictest of standards yet the same rules never seem to apply to our own self-created fires. "Google Apps is down! Clearly Google has some quality control issues!" Or maybe a well-intentioned human made a small unhandled error.
The are a few possible scenarios but none of them look good to me: how do you think it's possible for a CEO to send out emails without, presumably, them being checked for legislative compliance.
Like Etsy don't have an email template? Or don't have anyone in ITS who knows about CAN-SPAM? Or the boss over-ruled them? Or the org didn't care about spam? Or everyone was too afraid to mention it? Or ...
You can say "they just left it out", but how? If Etsy was a startup or 3 person business then, OK, it's a reasonable excuse. (Etsy have more than 600 employees according to Google search.)
Yes errors happen, this one looks bad for the organisation to me.
Way too often I see people in this industry pretend as though everyone else is expected to conform to the strictest of standards yet the same rules never seem to apply to our own self-created fires. "Google Apps is down! Clearly Google has some quality control issues!" Or maybe a well-intentioned human made a small unhandled error.