I mean that's not particularly surprising, since someone who both had the insights into how to improve a system and also the knowledge and power to change that same system (and who cares) will generally make those improvements. So if you see a broken system, and someone who knows how to fix it, and that person is not fixing it, there must be something (organizational badness, higher priority fires elsewhere, apathy, etc.) blocking them from fixing it.

Maybe we only hear about their frustration precisely because they don’t have the power to change things. “Leadership changed things for the better” isn’t much of a headline, it’s the expected/desired outcome.

This is exactly why it's so valuable to keep good notes while onboarding a new engineer... A fresh set of eyes gives you a rare opportunity to see problems that familiarity has blinded you to -- yet a new engineer is in the worst position to fix these problems.