I had dubious pleasure of working with similar codebases and devs. I'll remember one of those guys forever, because whenever he wanted to work on a new branch he would clone the repo, make changes to the master branch, and push code to a new repo numbered repo0001, repo002, ... He refused to change his ways, because "I have a PhD so you are wrong".
Another WTF moment was realisation that MS SQL Server does not support BOOLEAN type. That made porting code fun.
> Another WTF moment was realisation that MS SQL Server does not support BOOLEAN type.
The standard does not have a boolean type. It's a postgres extension that the other open source databases adopted (because, yeah, it's obvious). But the proprietary ones insist on not having.
The official recommendation is using byte on MS SQL and char(1) on Oracle. Both are ridiculous.
Another WTF moment was realisation that MS SQL Server does not support BOOLEAN type. That made porting code fun.