I have no clue about the underlying issue, but I'm guessing it's occurring on a boundary or an interplay between two systems.
Something like "the username can be part of the URL, and if the URL contains .mov, some browsers will misinterpret this and assume it's a movie file, leading to bad things™".
Or: "the username is sometimes used as a folder name, and our syncing software contains rules to exclude certain file extensions, so these folders were never synced, which lead to issues on production servers"
I'm guessing it's something along these lines. Something that you control, but not really, leading to these kind of haphazard workarounds.
Something like "the username can be part of the URL, and if the URL contains .mov, some browsers will misinterpret this and assume it's a movie file, leading to bad things™".
Or: "the username is sometimes used as a folder name, and our syncing software contains rules to exclude certain file extensions, so these folders were never synced, which lead to issues on production servers"
I'm guessing it's something along these lines. Something that you control, but not really, leading to these kind of haphazard workarounds.