I don’t know if it was that short term, but I’ve always been rather concerned with the sharp degree of hostility and even outright hatred that seems to be tacitly accepted or encouraged.

I cannot express enough how true this is. The key animators in a lot of Anime studios are overworked, but there are also “grunt farms” which handle the heavy work of filling in the animations. Even US (and really, everyone else) studios farm out a lot of work to these houses, who take the barebones stuff the main staff have assembled and turn it into a polished product.