The executive sponsor and their focus groups, product managers and their review committees, finance and their budgetary approvals, HR and their headcount approvals, the project managers and their technical working groups and sizing estimates, dev, UX, legal, test, deployment, DEI, customer advocacy, competitive analysis, etc all have to have representatives to develop a plan and sign off on it, meetings have to be scheduled, documents have to be created, approvals have to be stamped.
If you've ever worked in a true bureaucratic hellhole, you can understand how a few engineer-weeks turns into a 3 year 20 million dollar that can't be killed because too many "important" people would get egg on their face so it eventually gets rolled out, promotions and handshakes all around, and then it gets scrapped 2 weeks later because it is so terrible and nobody speaks of it again.