This sorts of stuff is very often experienced by staff as lame box-ticking exercises they have to suffer through annually or quarterly, put together by people who spend most of the time keeping their chair from floating to the ceiling, and were only hired to make things look better if anything bad happens ("well look, we did something, look at all these records of training videos and ridiculous quizzes we made everyone take!")
That may not have been the case at Mozilla but it absolutely is at a lot of bigcos and in government.
How are you so sure this version of it so rampant everywhere? I am genuinely curious why so many people state this is such a common occurrence yet I have yet to see it myself personally.
You may not have worked at or know many people who work at sufficiently boring workplaces. It's the default at those, and that's... most workplaces, among the ones big enough to have this kind of thing.
"Training" from HR means "watch dumb videos in a browser for two hours, then take a quiz you could have passed with a 100% score without watching the videos". If you're really unlucky it's some in-person variant that's the live equivalent of that. If this is not what you mean you're doing when you tell someone you've got "training" this week, you'll need to specify, because that's what all your fellow-suffering workers will assume it is. Many of them probably experience it at least annually, on a schedule, no matter how many times they've done essentially the same crap, and some more often.
I've been fortunate to be with small companies almost my entire career so I've experienced this first-hand exactly once, but my friend circle's not at small companies and not in tech. That's what they talk about when they talk about (complain about, commiserate over) "training". It's super common.
That may not have been the case at Mozilla but it absolutely is at a lot of bigcos and in government.