Yes. It's funny. It's the same kind of funny that "the game" (ha goteem), rickrolling, stick bugging the thing with the hand okay symbol, and even so far as "made you look" is. Just a simple easily spreadable and understandable "gotcha" to share with friends. It's constantly evolving and in a short time it will be something else with the same basic mechanism to be used as a gotcha and it will be funny too. Something doesn't need to be deep to spread a little laugh.
There's no way any amount of hats they can sell would make a dent in a wasted 8 year long development that had like 700 players max. They're even removing the merch from the store, I'd imagine the bad PR of having these things around is worse than getting the money from selling them.
Yeah their other stuff was even worse. They had a mug, a t-shirt and a hoodie. Those 3 things had cheap letters put on that looked like they would come off in a couple washes. I only got the hat because it had a patch that couldn't wash off. It's all very generic and low effort.
They had problems selling it on gear.playstation.com, I had to contact like 3 support people and they eventually submitted a manual order directly to the warehouse (?). They said they had an order to remove certain items from the site but it hadn't gone through yet. They didn't specify which items, but I'm sure you can make a good guess.
Edit: The title is just a meme, but I did legitimately buy one of these just to have a memento of the biggest flop in gaming history.
If you've been using Linux for 20 years that makes sense, as I have a lot of applications I used on windows that are not available on linux and have no alternative in any repo or flatpak, only as weird little projects on github (that don't work half the time). So I've spent a lot of time trying to replicate a resemblance of my work flow and QoL luxuries. Your work flow has been refined over that 20 years with little windows influence.
When are they going to remove this bot? Clearly it's not liked by the majority of users that see it.