Taking the manager's side for a moment, it echoes a somewhat-uncommon-but-important problem which we have in our industry: when management makes risk decisions for engineers, rather than engineers making those decisions for themselves. This gets into a mess of definition, but we can define that a superior in the organization who is fully informed about the costs and benefits and trade-offs and options, understanding and weighing it all, is still doing "engineering" and the problem is precisely that some way up the organizational hierarchy this capability breaks and we transition from "engineering" to "management". And the problem is precisely that at that level, administration has to transition from top-down authoritarian to bottom-up support, from a general directing their soldiers to the janitor slopping up their messes. Of course there is still some role for long-term vision, but the point is that this role does not encompass specific decisions that bear business risks, because these roles can't, because these roles are by definition not able to be completely informed about those risks.

In this case, we see a supervisor who is still close enough to the code to have the engineer's hat on, but whenever they interact with their own superiors they get the same refrain of "I don't understand this" -- so those people are managers. The problem is that the risk decision of keeping or firing the troublesome team member (as well as other decisions like whether the team's methodology should be agile or not etc.) has been usurped by management.

Normally this decision-making takes a more-concrete form like the 90s-era "And the code absolutely must be written in Java" ... "do you know what Java is?" ... "Yes, it is the software that enterprise businesses like ours use! We must use it!" ... "But this will be faster and more maintainable in another language" ... "Don't care, we need Java", or whatever. In this case I find it interesting that the issue exists one level up in hierarchy, sort of the same problem at a higher abstraction.