It's more than possible, it's expected.
While all of these things do happen, they are preventable and should not be treated as excusable, people need to be held accountable and systems / processes need to be put in place to ensure that these things don't reoccur.
Came here to post something similar.
Why jump through all these hoops to unfuck some inherently fucked system.
It's a bunch of work and time and effort to reverse engineer it just to get back to the point of still having a piece of shit legacy system.
Honestly this is effectively natural selection at play for businesses. They put themselves in this situation, if it dies and destroys the business ... good fucking riddance, the people who let this situation occur need to fail hard, it's the only way they will ever learn.
Just walk up to the machine and plug in a USB kill for 2 seconds, remove it, and get on with your life.
I agree about having fewer workers stacked with upgrades seems to be the "meta" but I found that the upgrades don't seem to stack linearly. For example, one Dev with 51x mechanical keyboards is not significantly faster than 2x Devs with 1x mech. keyboards each, and costs orders of magnitude more $.
For the Observation Training, your worker seems to work X tasks in a row when you manually click them to assign a task, where X is their "Observation Training" level.
So that automates their work if you assign it to them manually.
The self-starter training seems to take effect when you've not manually assigned a task to them. They will search for a single task to complete X times in a row, with a slight delay between each task, where X is equal to their "Self-Starter Training" level.
When their tasks are started automatically via this skill, the "Observation training" seems to be ignored.
He/she probably meant a particle filter mask, but it's always good to point out that this is something comoletely different from a surgical mask. Sadly a lot of people that really should depend on the particle filtration don't understand this, and wear surgical masks instead.