I think it is more nuanced, you can also change the organization bottom up, but it needs to be new stuff that does not exist or has it infancy. Changing existing stuff is very hard even top-down.
You can change something, like how an engineering team works and how an organisation does DevOps and other things that management doesn’t really know anything about and trust their employees on. But moving an organisation into something like team topologies which is a more modern expansion on Conway, is virtually impossible from the bottom up in my experience. Change management in general is very hard both directions, but it’s much harder going upwards because going upwards means you don’t really have the support of management above you. Maybe they’ll humour you but to make an actual impact you’re going to need them onboard. You’ll even have to reach pretty far up top if you want to inflict lasting culture changes as things carried by a single (or few) managers often dies with them.
My career has sort of put me in a role where I help non-tech startups transition from that to medium or enterprise size. I solely focus on the tech journey though, as I know I won’t have too much impact on culture or work processes on the grander scale. Often this leads to a semi-team topologies approach as the tech teams divide systems into independent business related services, but as a whole I don’t expect any changes to reach outside of the development departments.
The key is having a champion who can tie change in with higher level desires.
In these orgs there's often an external (as in stakeholders external to prod eng) perception that "engineering is slow, product doesn't deliver, they're preventing us delivering our OKRs", and that can be used as leverage for change.
You can't go dark and stop delivery, but you can usually carve out a 10 - 20% allowance for change (that doesn't sound much, but is 1 - 2 days every 2 weeks, which quickly adds up). Start small, show success in impacting metrics that external stakeholders care about, then next quarter push for more.
I've focused myself in a similar area as you, but actually lean into processes and people, whilst still guiding tech - maybe we should chat!
If it was new stuff, then the people doing it must not be very low at the bottom (by virtue of the org being quite shallow - such as a startup).
Even new stuff in a big company with lots of layers of management cannot make new stuff with excellence. Eventually, probably sooner rather than later, it gets polluted.
Not to mention that in a big org, the people at the bottom do not get rewarded for making excellence in engineering, if the top doesn't appreciate it. SO why go that extra mile, when a mediocre job will earn you the same salary? You'd be more incentivized to move jobs to grow your pay instead, and use this as a stepping stone.
I learned that the hard way, only the other way around.
If you want to seek meaning in your work, then yes, cubicle farms will not give you fulfilment. But if you're just after a steady paycheque, and don't give a damn about the business, your work nor its purpose, then this is fine. And it gives you free time to live outside of work too.