Pretty much. Anyone who's travelled UA for hundreds of thousands of miles knows that a significant minority of UA employees have zero interest in solving problems in any remotely useful way, either because they don’t care to or they are not empowered to do so. Instead they would prefer to just continue to stonewall or escalate the situation until the customer either gives up or goes away.

In this case neither happened, and now UA is reaping the rewards. I suspect the fact that it happened to UA first is less coincidence than culture.