Consulting with friends on a homework assignment should be a feature, not a bug. I'm so glad I went to a small college where collaboration was celebrated, not denigrated. FFS.

Honestly, if professors are too lazy to engage with their students and provide worthwhile and thoughtful homework assignments, can we blame students for being smart enough to google for the solution?

Also, a lot of my friends attend the local University of Texas to get their master's degree. UTSA is somewhat of a commuter school right now, but it attracts a lot of international students as well. The goal of most of these students is to use their student visa to get a technical degree, so they can get a work visa, which means they put a lot more value on their GPA than domestic students do. Valuing a grade over an education + professors that really don't care very much = lots and lots of rampant cheating, not just on homework assignments but on tests.

If we begin from the premise that these classes are nothing more than a series of hoops to jump through, then sure, the actions of the students are not the least bit surprising. In my own judgment, that an assignment is "boring" is not good and sufficient reason to cheat: this is school, not your favorite sitcom. That said, collaborating on an assignment is rather different than copying and pasting from some website: the former at least affords a chance to learn, whereas the later only helps reinforce the muscle memory of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
As the article points out, there's significant disincentive for the professor to haul kids before a committee and so on. The professor gets nothing from it personally, and the whole process is both time and energy-consuming. This leads to a situation where a blind eye is turned to certain kinds of cheating.
It is unfortunate that a significant fraction of higher education in the United States has become so adversarial. At least in the case of professional and graduate school admissions, colleges have been tasked with "weeding-out" candidates as much as it has been tasked with educating them. It may well be that these two goals are (at least partially) at odds.

On the other hand, if we start from the premise that there *are* genuinely useful knowledge and skills to be learned for their own sake, then homework is a part of that. I have taken classes (physical chemistry comes to mind) where both the homework and the examinations were more tools of education than tools of evaluation. I walked out of both the problem sets and the exams having learned more about the thought processes required to derive or prove certain relations -- the grades were nearly incidental at that point.
Under this premise, even if you pass the class with flying colors by cribbing notes or copying someone's exam, you're only going to be screwing yourself in the long run, out of skills and knowledge that you genuinely need to master (because you'll make use of them!)

If we begin from the premise that these classes are nothing more than a series of hoops to jump through, then sure, the actions of the students are not the least bit surprising.

I agree. The problem is that, in many cases and at some schools, the professors are the ones who view undergraduate and even masters classes as "a series of hoops to jump through". How can we expect students to view their coursework as a path to useful knowledge and skill if the professors, frankly, don't give a shit?

A college that does not value honest engagement, and does not signal that engagement through an academic honor code and through professor development, is going to develop a student culture that does not value honesty.

I can honestly say that, at my ridiculously tough alma mater, cheating on exams was very rare. To the point that a friend of mine forgot to turn in a take-home exam until after spring break, and the professor accepted it for full grading, even though my friend could have taken the entire break to get a perfect score. Cheating was rare because we developed, over 50 years, a strong honor system.