The author brings up the Nuremberg defense[1] as an example of complicity which is indefensible, but this is rhetorically quite hollow. If you go a little bit further into political theory and consider Arendt's conception of the banality of evil[2], and furthermore the idea of a panopticon[3], you very quickly come to the philosophical impasse between individual culpability and agency and systematic mechanisms and the political.
What is this impasse? Plainly, I think it is that the individual has nearly zero agency alone, and only has power when effectively organizing into groups. That makes arguments like these functionally useless (or even "usefully idiotic"[5]), because they fundamentally misattribute the locus of value production, capture of capital and political clout onto the individual, in what Marx would call the petite bourgeoisie[4].
This misattribution misses the asymmetric distribution of power towards the top of organizational hierarchies, especially within the size of large mega-corporations. If this author were correct and engineers were truly accountable for the work of their employers, what is the unique labor that managers and executives contribute to the corporation that ICs do not provide? And who has the power to make and override decisions at a corporate policy level? It's transparently obvious that corporations are intentionally set up divide labor such that decision making agency is allocated towards executive leadership and management, and that line level ICs serve to execute on those decisions but do not have the agency to veto decisions they disagree with.
This is obvious to anyone who has ever worked at a mega-corporation, enough so that I wonder if the author has. If they have not, then the post amounts merely to speculation about something the author doesn't have enough firsthand experience with to credibly analyze. That doesn't mean it should have never been written, but I certainly got no value from it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Criticism_and_use_a...