The sauce is mostly tamari soy sauce and honey
My sous chef is like "no if I wanted to do gochujang I'd make a gochujang paste" but like we have these big jugs of gochujang sauce and like why would you not add even a little to make it an actually korean sauce???
am i crazy, am i bad at cooking, i don't know
Yes, Gochujang would be a fantastic addition. It would improve the flavor quite a bit. However, westerners find jalapeno spicy. Gochujang is hotter than what people want out of the sweet option. I worked at a restaurant that kept korean chili powder for this exact purpose because westerners want the ginger type warmth without ginger, but they don't want it to be that spicy. Gochujang will be very popular in the general restaurant circuit in a few years, but it's gonna be in dishes like Nashville Hot chicken (already seen it there) where the spice is a big part of the meal because of its reputation among cooks and the general public.
Idk i think I could add like a little bit of it enough to affect the flavor of the sauce without making it taste too spicy
I'm not disagreeing with you, I think Gochujang would improve the sauce quite a bit. But I could say the same thing about Nashville Hot in a different context. If it's a big enough flavor that you'd have to list it on the menu, you can't just use a small amount because people are expecting it to be hotter than it really would be. Non-spicy people wouldn't buy, spicy people would be upset you didn't put enough in.
As cooks, we don't sell food we sell the idea of food. I don't know where you're from, but I'm assuming it's the west. The highest selling Chinese food in America is General Tso's chicken, a dish made from American takeout restaurants. The only Chinese guy that actually claims inventing it was a 1940s nationalist who had to flee to Taiwan during the revolution. So a shithead. Ironically, people in China also don't like General Tso's.
It's not Chinese food, it's the American idea of what Chinese food is. Sticky chicken/shrimp is probably the General Tso equivalent, a dish that isn't meant to be authentic and is more of a signifier for "vaguely ethnic tasting sugary meat". It's like how most places that sell spaghetti have shitty spaghetti. It's not that they don't know how to make a good spaghetti, it's that the customers want shitty spaghetti.