The CTO seems publicly happy with him since the CTO leans on him more and more. He is doing his VP work during the day, coding for projects on the evening and weekends. Some services, he completely owns. He codes, QA, and deploys them without any other people's inputs.

The only person with an architect title is the VPs right hand man. They were hired at the same time (10+ years ago). The architect never questions the VPs design/decisions.

Yes, its hard gated. This project has been delayed 3 weeks already from starting because the VP has not have the time to approve the designs, etc.