We recently had to buy out a director that kept all the technical knowledge to themselves for the last 20 years. They were almost always available 24x7 for outage calls and it became clear his teams didn’t know shit about anything, especially when said director was sick or on vacation. He was labeled a danger to the infrastructure and settled for a multimillion dollar buyout with a full knowledge transfer. Retirement age, fat 401k, company stock and other investments… yeah, he took that deal immediately, like no hesitation.

The unrealistic part is management admitting to a mistake

Remember kids, make your code as confusing as possible. Clear documentation just makes it easier to replace you.

That's the POV when the company leadership doesn't understand software development and promotes based on quick wins.

Companies that allows and even encourage bus factors of one devs like John will always have these issues.

As a John in both name and in relation to my main project at work, I am working my ass off to write comprehensive documentation and to train the rest of the team to take over. I don't wanna be working on this same shit in 5 years.