Yeah ! Sometimes it’s the case and they brought interesting new ideas to the table. Sometime it’s just plain non-understanding 
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For that particular case , sadly I think it’s that they don’t see the point, but as you said they might need to solve that for their own movies.
They use their short films to evaluate blender in production, but this differs a bit from standard production :
One big point is that blender is the main DCC and they don’t have a pipeline that mixes Zbrush, Substance, Nuke, Avid/Premiere…
They also don’t work with different projects and legacy software version in parallel.
Because of that, they tend to be less self aware of issues related to that.
Also, compared to other DCC they don’t depend on the industry. They don’t get a lot of benefit for having blender adopted by many VFX or animation companies especially if they don’t contribute to the code. Therefore they don’t try to be in close competition to other DCC.
Their main goal is to provide 3D creation to the masses, regardless if it’s a big studio or a few individuals. That leads to blender being really cool but not 100% standard.
On the bright side, they share all their production process, so you might dig a bit into how they did their open movies, and how their pipeline is structured.
TBH , I build a small pipeline for animation series and I didn’t feel the need of using environment variables.
Here is a demo of the pipeline : https://vimeo.com/374111209
And a project done with it : Boon & Pimento : Cartoon series made with blender
May I ask how it is useful to you ?