Its straight up illegal to leave the tow hitch on here - not that cops bother ticketing for it

Yep. These are all removable. A good samaritan would not just take this picture. They'd also go down the line and remove these hitches to clear the path.

If you throw the hitches at the trucks they came from, it might cause some damage or even break something, so you wouldn't want to do that. The safe thing is to lay them on the ground.