How likely is that the sysadmins were told to 'just make it run cheaper, I don't care' by someone higher in the foodchain?
Having worked in ops for > 10 years, this is how it usually goes.
The SA's job tends to involve a lot of scepticism and caution. You look for problems and try to solve them proactively. One (often easy) way to solve many classes of problems is to throw hardware at them.
Management always pushes back on this tactic. That's reasonable; they need to justify capital expenses (especially if you're self-hosted).
The core issue though is that capital expenses are easy to quantify, while "lost productivity" is much harder to fully account for. If I complain that some hardware upgrade which costs $x could improve productivity, I just don't have hard numbers on my end - it's all napkin math.
In many places reluctance to spend money on infrastructure is also, I think, a symptom of headcount-itis. Managers love to have more employees, and love to have more for them to do, because that makes managers seem more impressive to the org. My manager might have perverse incentives; keeping the SAs busy fighting scaling fires both makes his team look impressive because they're busier, and makes him look better because the capital expenditures are lower.
Obviously, head count is expensive, so this is usually a game of appearances rather than an effective strategy to improve the bottom line. Good insight into productivity is required to catch this kind of stuff, but in the real world I've found that a lot of places just don't have an org structure capable of weighing cost / benefit properly when it comes to infrastructure.
If you're blindly following "orders" to reduce costs and doing things that push up costs elsewhere then you're not doing a good job. A good sysadmin (or the sysadmin's boss) should be able to pull up some numbers and say "Build tasks are being queued for an hour before they run. What impact is that having?", and call a wider meeting that brings together the higher-up-the-foodchain manager, the development team, and anyone else who might be affected. Ideally it'd be the higher up manager who calls that meeting of course, but they may not understand the technical issues.
This is the responsibility of someone above to know whether or not the orders they give should be given. If they need to ask for information from people below them, fantastic, please help them along.
Please don't fall on the sword for incompetent managers.
Yes, and part of that is the people in their team(s) helping them and understanding that they're fallible and may fail to ask a pertinent question. Equally, the manager needs to be open to updates volunteered by their team without a prompt. Ultimately everyone does better if the entire group works together.
All it needed was for the question to be asked on the company's internal board and listen to the answer. Even trying it once or twice and I'd probably have forgotten about it in short order. This went on for a couple of years though!