So a company gives junior engineers full access to a production database without backup so they can work on it developing features that require DDL SQL commands. I've seen it happen before, what I've never seen is someone blame the junior employee when things undoubtedly go south.
I'm not sure I even believe that part of the story. This was either a very disfunctional company or a looooong time ago.
I haven't personally seen this particular case either but I have no doubt it could happen. I've seen orgs where a blameless type culture isn't natural, and I've had to explain to the leadership that publicly humiliating (in jest) someone for getting caught by the phishing tests or posting private data to a pastebin type service is a bad idea.
And I've interacted with plenty of people who externalize everything that goes wrong to them, naturally some of these folks will be in leadership positions.
I'm not sure I even believe that part of the story. This was either a very disfunctional company or a looooong time ago.