> I also think it’s ok for a monarchy as opposed to democracy ruling what gets approved, assuming merit based is not an option.
Just to share: I've been an outside advisor to a few companies where some developers may think "this is a politics based monarchy and we're not looking at proposals rationally". Where as an outsider it was clear to me that the higher up roles just had more context to make their decisions.
Especially decisions coming from the CTO and VP Engineering kind of roles tended to be driven by input from the wider company strategy, due to daily interaction with the rest of the management team.
In those cases there was a clear need for coaching the higher ups on how to explain and communicate their decisions, but what they were deciding were the right things. And everybody leaving before they improved communications would be on here posting about how bad their higher ups were and what a political mess it was. While that wasn't really the issue.
I'm sure that's not always the case and big political dumpster fires exist (I've seen a few), but there are also many cases where it's only an issue with communicating more clearly from the (technical) management side of things.