Meanwhile, .tech exists and is not country-specific but is far less popular for some reason.

Simple answer: length.

Two chars look a lot better than something with more chars, and all two chars TLD are ccTLDs.

But then it is the developers fault, never management

Yepp, and no one really listens to the others, just trying to remember what you did and make sure no one dumps more work on you.

Only issue I see is that the 8 chars required is very short and easy to brute force. You would hope that people would go for the recommended instead, but doubt it.