I think any time you're dealing with data in the form of an enum, a switch usually the natural way to handle cases. Many compilers will warn you when you've missed a case, which is a nice check to have. Similarly, in languages that support ADTs, pattern matching tends to be the sensible thing to do.

But I agree that in the case you described, that the programmer was being stupid. However they could have written it as a giant if-elseif block and that would also have been stupid, or a loop over a giant list of years, and that also would have been stupid. I think the problem was the programmer not thinking about the problem carefully, not with the control-flow construct they used to write the bad code.