The game industry has a completely different way of working compared to other tech fields. Most of their practices seem old fashioned, or anti-patterns, etc. if you look at them from an outside point of view.
But they're trying to do something very hard: control both quality and deadline. It's not like an open source or enterprise IT project. The game has to be finished, good, by a given date. To do that they do many things, including slaughtering sacred cows about how things are supposed to be done. If hard locking saves them time by avoiding wasted efforts, by artists who are probably over-worked already, then what's the problem?
