I don’t work for easyJet, but if it had been my decision, I would have had the engineers remove that row of seats completely. It would take, what, 5 mins during turnaround? And then, apart from the obvious gap, the cabin would have looked normal and presentable, and more importantly; safe.
I suspect what happened is that someone in easyJet Ops were told over the phone that two seats were unserviceable, so they decreed that the aircraft stayed in the schedule and kept flying with minus two seats, BUT without realising how unserviceable the seats actually were and how awful they looked and what that would do to passenger confidence and the company image.
Then as each subsequent Dispatcher and Cabin crew and Captain saw the seats, they might have queried it but Ops said yes, we know: leave them and keep flying. So shaking their heads, the crew carried on.
I would like to think that if everyone in the chain of command had actually seen how bad the seats were, i.e. not simply soiled or broken, as sometimes happens, then proper action would have been taken in the first place.