SDE1 here, I might be completely wrong but I'm inclined to believe that upper management is kept practically blind about the real struggles and issues experienced on lower-levels, and this scenario is abused by managers to scapegoat their way out of problems they have to deal with, specially the ones they created. I'm not going to provide examples as they could be easily traced back, but I can say that I've witnessed a L7 overpromissing on a project in spite of callouts from lower levels, and once postponing the delivery of some milestones started to become inevitable then I've started hearing said manager frequently mention "firing offenses" on dailies.