every organization is held back by the slowest adopter. If you advance too quickly compared to your colleges then you will likely leave because everyone else feels like they are trying to pull you back into their crap. Innovation is a depreciating asset. If you don't reward the people who make a quantum leap, they will leave, and all their progress will revert to the mean.
I bet someone made a security key because it was the right thing to do but they didn't have the controls in place to manage it in their build system and give another key to developers/engineers/etc. So someone else copied it for convivence rather than have to explain to every moron in the whole company how to use it to access the database or run their monolith tests or get access from the dude that no longer works there who was the "giver" of access keys.
I bet someone made a security key because it was the right thing to do but they didn't have the controls in place to manage it in their build system and give another key to developers/engineers/etc. So someone else copied it for convivence rather than have to explain to every moron in the whole company how to use it to access the database or run their monolith tests or get access from the dude that no longer works there who was the "giver" of access keys.