I have a similar story while working at a large well-known tech company many years ago. A major project in my group had a critical dependency on an important project owned by a VP in another group, who had several engineers working on it for many months with no delivery date in sight.

Me and another guy replaced that external dependency with our own complete implementation, created over a two-week marathon coding session. It worked great, met all the acceptance criteria, and we shipped it. My VP was quite pleased, as it was a big win for the company.

This precipitated one of the ugliest and most out-in-the-open political battles I have ever witnessed in a large company. When the dust settled, we were allowed to use our own implementation, begrudingingly, but no one else was. I did not stick around long enough to know if the other VP ever actually managed to ship anything. It was quite the farce.